We have come too far together

Bright green leaves visible on the oak tree across the field. Our oaks here were brought out to Africa from Europe by the Dutch settler Simon van der Stel three centuries ago and flourish all over the Cape. The wood is not good enough for furniture or flooring because our winters are too mild and the oak does not harden. Often the trees die of stress in a hot drought-stricken summer.

There is nothing like the green of spring.

Which statement calls for a poem. Currently frazzled with work and housekeeping and budgeting and a bout of sleeplessness, but I want to celebrate spring in some way.

Love, despair, the sudden edible bright green everywhere, snails mating on a high garden walls (gleaming silver figures-of-eight).

The Silver Lily

by Louise Glück

The nights have grown cool again, like the nights

of early spring, and quiet again. Will

speech disturb you? We’re

alone now; we have no reason for silence.

 

Can you see, over the garden—the full moon rises.

I won’t see the next full moon.

 

In spring, when the moon rose, it meant

time was endless. Snowdrops

opened and closed, the clustered

seeds of the maples fell in pale drifts.

White over white, the moon rose over the birch tree.

And in the crook, where the tree divides,

leaves of the first daffodils, in moonlight

soft greenish-silver.

 

We have come too far together toward the end now

to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain

I know what the end means. And you, who’ve been with a man—

 

after the first cries,

doesn’t joy, like fear, make no sound?

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