Listen
When you have nothing left to say
the apples are still growing
you would call it silently because
you can't hear them but who knows
how loud they sound to the ants
herding their aphids onto the peony
buds just below, what do the towhees
think of that green music, is there
a shimmer of plums, an echo of pears
expanding, what else have you assumed
you understood and been mistaken?
What swells secretly beside you,
is it hope?
the apples are still growing
you would call it silently because
you can't hear them but who knows
how loud they sound to the ants
herding their aphids onto the peony
buds just below, what do the towhees
think of that green music, is there
a shimmer of plums, an echo of pears
expanding, what else have you assumed
you understood and been mistaken?
What swells secretly beside you,
is it hope?
Sept / Oct 2023
Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She's the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and Everything But the Kitchen Skunk among other books and has won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills, where she provides weekly commentary to community radio, and works as a radical life coach. Visit her on Patreon.
Art: Cam Pietralunga. Fast Times. Acrylic on canvas.