LITTLE TREE

 

When my daughter was born, not

so very long ago -- entering this world early,

small enough to cradle in the palm

of my outstretched hand -- a friend gifted

our family a fig tree planted in her name,

thousands of miles from the cool, white hospital rooms

we called home during those first few weeks.

This morning, the rockets again drawing

their wordless script across that ancient landscape,

obliterating much, erasing the prayers

of the many and the few, their message

unmistakable, familiar, everything seems closer,

visceral, as sudden and startling as a punch.

I think again of that little tree, giver of

shade and light, respite, oxygen, that seemingly

endless ladder of knots and hidden doorways

for young, skinny arms and legs to climb,

stretching its coils of roots tentatively into a soil

continually scarred and shuddering with uncertainty;

little tree, little lamp, beginning and ending of

every fable, making its way -- as it must --

upward into the bright expanse of sky.