These Green-Going-to-Yellow
by Marvin Bell
This year,
I’m raising the emotional ante,
putting my face
in the leaves to be stepped on,
seeing myself among them, that is;
that is, likening
leaf-vein to artery, leaf to flesh,
the passage of a leaf in autumn
to the passage of autumn,
branch-tip and winter spaces
to possibilities, and possibility
to God. Even on East 61st Street
in the blowzy city of New York,
someone has planted a gingko
because it has leaves like fans like hands,
hand-leaves, and sex. Those lovely
Chinese hands on the sidewalks
so far from delicacy
or even, perhaps, another gender of gingko–
do we see them?
No one ever treated us so gently
as these green-going-to-yellow hands
fanned out where we walk.
No one ever fell down so quietly
and lay where we would look
when we were tired or embarrassed,
or so bowed down by humanity
that we had to watch out lest our shoes stumble,
and looked down not to look up
until something looked like parts of people
where we were walking. We have no
experience to make us see the gingko
or any other tree,
and, in our admiration for whatever grows tall
and outlives us,
we look away, or look at the middles of things,
which would not be our way
if we truly thought we were gods.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- The Water-Nymph poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Вера Павлова – Телефонные кнопки
- The River Has Its Memories by Mary Etta Metcalf
- My Mother by Claude McKay
- Europe, the 72d and 73d years of These States. by Walt Whitman
- Sonnet LXII by William Shakespeare
- Владимир Маяковский – Тексты “окон”, переработанные для сборника “Грозный смех”
- Федор Сологуб – Я часть загадки разгадал
- A Song of Peach-Blossom River by Wang Wei
- The Dunciad: Book I. poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- A Fairy Song by William Shakespeare
- Of Clementina by Walter Savage Landor
- Как просто было в юности
- Robert Burns: O, Were I On Parnassus Hill:
- America, America by Saadi Youssef
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).