Love Letter
Against a windswept darkening sky,
against the geometric bite of power lines,
against the muddy brown field,
bracing itself for snow –
Four turning trees
write a love letter to the sky.
Red maple trees,
and oh!
red
red
maple.
Each crisp, bright leaf
snapping like the flags
of countries undiscovered,
and countries long gone.
Kelly Barnhill 
I like the crisp feel of your poetry. Definitely a great post!
Hi Kelly, it was so good to see you at the wedding. Your crying made it somehow okay for the rest of us. As for your poem, I was really liking it, until I got to the part about the snapping leaves, “like flags of ….” That’s sort of like saying the snapping had the sound of one hand clapping, don’t you think? I mean, undiscovered countries don’t have flags yet (being free of the of nationalism so far), and long-gone countries left them behind in the mud. So what about that reminds you of maple leaves, exactly? I’m just teasing, just wanted to say hi. As always, you rock.
your auntie Maryellen
😀
Thanks for stopping by auntie Maryellen! Come one over anytime!
And honestly, I don’t know where the conflagration came from, but that’s what occurred to me on my run, so that was the architecture of the poem. But the thing about these poems on my blog – they’re not real poems. They’re really not. They’re more like – I don’t know – found objects, pulled out whole and tied to balloon strings and sent flying away. If I was a *real* poet, I’d revise, rebuild, refashion and retool. But I’m not. So the associations and metaphors that you see in these are the things that made sense in my busted mind in the moment that I wrote them. And I’ll leave the real poetry – the stuff you see in journals – to the professionals.
Makes sense to me! Thanks for following up.
Maryellen