for love of leaves
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leave subsides to leaf .
So Eden sank to grief, …
Nothing gold can stay.
– Robert Frost
All summer, the chlorophyll of the leaf, all that green, absorbs the sun and releases food and it this cycle of chlorophyll that cloaks the leaves’ pure colors.
Shalom kneels under the pear tree, picks herself a yellow leaf, gold for a pocket.
I finger the edge of a scarlet one.
“But come the fall of the year, come November — the chlorophyll ebbs. And the green dims.”
Shalom holds up an ember leaf.
“And there it is — the leaf’s true colors!”
Shalom whispers, bowed over her gilded leaf — “You mean this leaf was always this colour?”
And I nod.
All this brilliance, all this God glory — it is always here.
But life can blind and truth can hide in plain sight and the ways of God burn underneath everything.
Life has blinding cycles of its own — but our God is always blazing glory.
And when you whisper thanks to God — you glimpse the glory of God and pure grace colors your world.
And I pick up a pen to thank through the fall days.
And the dark ebbs and the shadows dim –
and all the trees and the thankful ignite with the true colours of the glorious now.
A Holy Experience
http://www.aholyexperience.com/
life: acoustic & amplified 