Words for the Chisel (collection)/Green Parable

by Genevieve Taggard

Green Parable

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

While in between them fall with little strokesTheir rotting twigs. They sigh. They have no moodFor falling bit by bit. They clutch the airAnd press the stones their roots are struck among—This being spring and trouble in their blood.

All seasons are alike to them. They bearNo fruit for seed. But this sly early springFor once has come, for once has stolen upon them;They wait arrested threshing, while they wringTheir hands and turn their heads bewildered,—allThe tips that merely budded they let fall;They hold no bud with calyxes. They needA thing they have no name for. How they pushUpon each other, bid each other hushAnd hush the squirrels, turn upon the birdsWith troubled rigid faces. Weighed with fearAnd laden with the wind and withered seedThey stand and sigh and part their leaves and peerOver each other's shoulders down a laneOf aged nettles quivering for rain.

Now in a hasty ripple and a slowEarth-slipping sigh, the blasted tips are stirred;Something is coming, something is coming soClose 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-fallPours down against the sky's high crystal wall.

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

The stranger strides with blazing face, the strangerInvisible, 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 goldAnd all around the gold-green rips its sheathIn emerald air, from an emerald earth beneath.

And one who cast herself imploring before himHer long hair flung across his path, now turnsTo lift rejoicing leaves on every limb;Another rockets upward. Crisply burnsEarth's unpolluted green in fronds and ferns.