Saturday, April 27, 2013

Responding to a Reader: Buckeye Trees and Little Gospels



Last month, when I posted a poem here about a walk in the park which focused on the new spring growth then jumping up all over the place in our area, a reader named r1c10 posted a response that has never left my mind and heart--something gorgeous. She/he wrote:


Bill,
 
Beautiful word picture and illustration! How do those those miniscule capsules of life endure the ravages of Winter alive and whole? There is a kind of saintliness in each one, not to mention a gospel.

I love that thought that each blade of new upspringing grass preaches a little gospel to us. I've thought of r1c10's comment recently as we pass a buckeye tree on our walks in the same park about which my March poem was written. 

I wrote about this buckeye last June, when last summer's protracted drought and heat had decimated the little tree, and I feared it had died. A neighbor who lives right beside the park, a wonderful woman who has planted (and tends) shrubs and trees all through the park with no recompense from the city, assured me the buckeye would come back, since they're tough trees.

And she was right: the photo at the head of the posting is one I took on a walk in the park yesterday afternoon. It's the selfsame buckeye in all its spring glory putting Solomon to shame.

A little gospel I need to hear preached to me when I'm so prone to despair and see only the darkness in a world also full of light that the darkness cannot grasp and enclose.

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