dotlit: 'The Dead Tree Lesson'

The Online Journal
of Creative Writing

Edited by Donna Lee Brien (general), Philip Neilsen (poetry), and Axel Bruns (hypermedia and Webmaster)

ISSN 1444-2817

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	The Dead Tree Lesson Mark Allinson


	Last night walking in the garden meditating on the changes		1

	I looked up and noticed the old dead tree curling the bones of its crippled fingers		2

	in an evening prayer. And no other tree in the garden had such power.		3

	The pear tree dripped its sappy green globules. The crab-apple in a crimson pool		4

	of its own fruit. And the oak glistened in the shimmering green pride of its life.		5

	But in the gesture of its grasp against the evening sky		6

	the dead tree was revealing all the ways the wind had twisted its desires.		7