Protector of the Yard

I lay face up with the sun

Stretching, reaching, and blinding

Me on this hot summer day. With no worries

Except if blisters will form on the now

Red skin of formally white pigments.

I feel the cool branches waving above me

Swaying back and forth, and back and forth

With the calm and crisp noise the leaves make

As they run into each other avoiding the touch

Of earth beneath her flesh and veins.

Is she watching me?

Standing tall above the yard, above the competing

Tree lines, and above the mountain in the distance.

Will she help when I am in need?

Or will she stand frozen from approaching dangers?

I remember the welt from her branch; that switch.

The feel of her hard, dry, scratchy bark beneath my feet.

How her roots, so grounded, made it impossible

To have her moved from the yard as our clock tower.

But most of all I remember the digging of soil from her base.

The blisters on my hands from the shovel,

The protection she provided on the hot day,

The leafs she dropped, as if tears of sorrow,

The flowers she bloomed to mark the spot of loss,

And the curves of her roots to protect the buried box.

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I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,

Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,

Though how do you get into this old track?’

And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see

That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision

A shape which, somehow, there may be.’

So I went on softly from the glade,

And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition—

My head unturned lest my dream should fade.