Perspective by Robbi Nester

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Perspective

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Sometimes in winter, I sit on the red bench

under the sycamore, remembering spring,

the faint green florescence of the earliest leaves,

almost a rumor, then the brash unfolding,

the tree sifting sunlight through its branches,

hoarding its riches in the roots. Though it

cannot be discerned, all trees, crowned

with moonlight, grow toward the brightest stars.

In autumn, the seeds come coptering to the ground

in their hundreds, where they send out cautious roots.

In this cold season, the bench too remembers

that before the shaved planks, sweet smell

of sawdust, it once was a tree, holding sunlight

deep underground, awaiting its next incarnation.

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Robbi Nester is an elected member of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four books of poetry–a chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012) and three collections: A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019). She has edited two anthologies of poetry: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014) and an ekphrastic e-book published as a special issue of Poemeleon Poetry Journal)–Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees–celebrating the photography of Beth Moon. Her poetry, reviews, articles, and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, most recently in Is it Hot in Here, or is it Just me?, an anthology, Pirene’s Fountain’s Culinary Poems, Lady Liberty, Tiferet, and Rhino.

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