The Earth Turns South/Green Leaves
GREEN LEAVES
For Clara Ellen Swartz
I.We slid out of the street-locked park,—A rolling, curving stretch of woodMay-odorous, and proudly green,—Into cleft streets, whose bricked walls stoodIn stolid death, as our machineSkidded and righted, like some darkLow-flying creature, fleeing a shout.We wound and swirled and bent about,Yet still the oddly scattered treesWatched us, in curious disdain. . . .And then we found a park again,And a triumphant horde of theseGreen guardians of green mysteries.
Out of the green—into the green—And all the bricked-up blocks betweenBlurred to a dulling monochrome:Here was our first and our last home.
II.We saw trees watch us, as we spedThrough bricked streets dying or already dead. They were on silent sentry go,Coolly watching the human foe.Stiffly and silently, as we sped,They watched with their green eyes overhead.
III.High on a hill, as we swept by,We saw green trees buttress the sky,Stiff and terrible and high,And in no human way serene.The sky was gray, but the living sheenTortured our eyes. And then the keenUnsparing sun flung his aureoleAround each rooted living soul. . . .We scarce dared look upon the whole,So painfully, passionately green.But one shade brighter, and those highGreen flames would burn the tortured sky.
IV.Circling the city's tree-cleared spaceThe forests peer with covetous face,The forests creep with wolfish pace,Faltering, wily, and yet elate. There in their pride they crouch and wait,A green-eyed ring of wolves, who slayThe night-bound straggler for their prey. . . .Closer and closer they inch their way.
V.You think a park is a fenced and clippedBody of tree claves, manacled tight?They will march free on their own night.See how one venturesome root has grippedAnd twisted the pavement's concrete mass,Forcing a widening crevasse.See how the grass between the bricksWorries them with its gradual tricks.See how the slow boughs reach an armOver the fence to things forbidden;And the white roots keep up a hiddenEndless restlessness, groping their harm.
The seasons crowd with muffled tread;Man will abandon the brick-walled street. . . .The trees' triumph will be complete.The staid blank walls will be engravedWith what the ivy creepers plaited; There will be life where all is dead,Life, green life, tangled and matted.Tearing apart what man has paved,Strange new shoots will force their way:Life, green life, will conquer the clay.
V.What are weBut leaves of a tree,Pallid, fluttering leaves of a tree,Whited and thinned,Flung by the wind,Torn and freed by the scattering wind,Treading, and trodBy man and godInto our mother and grave, the sod?
VI.Before man was, the patient treesGreened in the Spring, dulled in the fall.And after us, their vivid shawlWill cover the nude brown limbs of earth.Their slavery to man is brief—They will come back to the free mirth Of unhedged stem and unclipped leaf,Over the earth in triumph running,Glowing green victory. Man seesThe gradual surge, and builds him poorOases of brick and stone and plaster—But in the end the green is master.And when man's hand has lost its cunning,In some unguessed untimed disaster,He shall lie and see the slow sereneOnward march of the army of green—See soil and sky, and nothing betweenBut the endless sweep of the joyous green.