Words for the Chisel (collection)/Green Parable

by Genevieve Taggard

Green Parable

A crowd of women, like a little wood
Of barefoot birches, running under oaks
Wait on the hillside, linger, old and young—
This being spring and trouble in their blood.

While in between them fall with little strokes
Their rotting twigs. They sigh. They have no mood
For falling bit by bit. They clutch the air
And press the stones their roots are struck among—
This being spring and trouble in their blood.

All seasons are alike to them. They bear
No fruit for seed. But this sly early spring
For once has come, for once has stolen upon them;
They wait arrested threshing, while they wring
Their hands and turn their heads bewildered,—all
The tips that merely budded they let fall;
They hold no bud with calyxes. They need
A thing they have no name for. How they push
Upon each other, bid each other hush
And hush the squirrels, turn upon the birds
With troubled rigid faces. Weighed with fear
And laden with the wind and withered seed
They stand and sigh and part their leaves and peer
Over each other's shoulders down a lane
Of aged nettles quivering for rain.

Now in a hasty ripple and a slow
Earth-slipping sigh, the blasted tips are stirred;
Something is coming, something is coming so
Close that it comes too quiet to be heard.

Toss! Down a lane a tall tree flashes,
Turrets of leaves from a pillar of ashes—
Fountains of leaves, a leafy water-fall
Pours down against the sky's high crystal wall.

The young earth wrinkles like a small mole's mound,—
An undulating river underground
Comes like the summer, comes without a sound.

The stranger strides with blazing face, the stranger
Invisible, intangible, and bold;
He brings green torches and he treads in anger,
Lifts up the fallen, shakes alive the old;
He blows a breath before him, blazing gold
And all around the gold-green rips its sheath
In emerald air, from an emerald earth beneath.

And one who cast herself imploring before him
Her long hair flung across his path, now turns
To lift rejoicing leaves on every limb;
Another rockets upward. Crisply burns
Earth's unpolluted green in fronds and ferns.