My Autumn Tree

My Autumn Tree

by Sue Petrovski

I looked beneath the bark
And color,
A mockery in beauty
Of my aging life.
Played out in golds and bronze.

This old crone of a tree
With its ugly, bony limbs,
Yet filling my world
With the shimmer of burnished bronze;
Sharing my sunlight toward the end of day.

This tree grown from weed?
That reaches now toward heaven
With limbs that downward
Bend and twist; a crooked wreck
But beautiful in an unseen way.

A gnarled copy of my own
Ripened image.
Sowen, as I
In unremarkable soil
From roots of
Unreknown birthright.

Noble only in its color
And stature and task;
To provide shade and shadow -
Doing only as bidden
By genus and phylum.

But more. I lived that tree.
My heart’s joy is in
It’s yearly blessing
As it aches and stretches toward the sky,
Yet readily performs
Its charge on earth.

Who needed more of
An Aging tree - or man
Than what has been given:
Purely, beautifully,
In a grand and honest style?

What did it owe
Besides the valient fact
That it looked beyond the edge;
Moving and flowing with
The tides of life.

It was there.