The Poem of Trees

MichaelJ.Shepley

I saw this morning poetry that the trees wrote on the mirror of the waters of the winter pond at sunrise as they stood like naked black burnt skeletons in the tinfoil morning light of turn of year sun’s cipher false promising that heat will come

Maybe someday

But the trees in their zen patience scribbled cursive calligraphy elegiac if enigmatic and most probably cryptic even odd verses flat black in the ink of shadows

And otherwise in the breathless frenetic silence where the birds had balled all of themselves up into featherbeds in the nooks and boles and still shivered and would not even raise a peep I tried to break the black code of oak and beech maple and elm alder and old ash and could not make out even one lousy word

Michael J. Shepley is a writer who lives and works, still, in Sacramento, California. His poems have in the past appeared in Vallum, Common Ground, CQ, The Kerf, Blue Unicorn, Plainsongs, Salt & others.