One tree stands in the temple yard, slanting but stable, its bare limbs lazily spiral skyward. Its trunk is gnarled and its branches are twisted and it makes the old ruins around it look modern by comparison. The trunk radiates hardness, a strength from deformation, like the sinewy limbs of a laborer whose muscles are held in constant tension, until they can no longer know suppleness. Seekers of shade and enlightenment once sought its shadow, but now it can only offer a good example. leafless tree -- sitting in the temple yard, luring Buddhas
Tag Archives: tree
Gravity-free Tree [Tanka]
Lone Tree [Haiku]
DAILY PHOTO: Low Tide Tree
POEM: A Sprout’s Life [PoMo Day 18 – Imagist]
Four Tenacious Leaf Haiku
POEM: Imagination Tree
Under blue skies, the live oaks were just trees — hearty and expansive trees.
But in the feeble light of waning days or the frequent forays of morning fog, the rangy and sinuous moss-draped limbs became a Lovecraftian monster, head stuck into the damp loam in an attempted retreat to the underworld.
And if one stood still enough, those limbs just might start to writhe.
POEM: One Tree
In this land of tropical green,
there is one tree timed to north lands.
Its leaves turn red from deepest green,
and fall as if to season’s plans.
They fall not by mere ones or twos,
but in wild, fluttering masses.
Inside, it gives one the bronzy blues
to starkly feel the year’s passage.
To see sunny-side branches nude,
and know the numbered days still left
for ever-redder multitudes
who suffer time’s — and wind’s — great theft.
No land is so foreign to me
that I can’t see home in a tree.













