pink, fragile as butterfly wings,
… miraculously escaping killing frosts
I’ve endured Sol’s blistering heat
Sky’s teardrop spills of paltry rain
… ripening, sweeting in summer’s brutal furnace
buffeted by bellows of torrential winds
…. in Fall I break open, food for songbirds.
My pit falls to the ground to languish perhaps,
… or be swept under a protective mulch of leaves
to savor the lean moisture of parsimonious winter
and sprout tender green in spring:
a symbol of enduring hope.
Published in Poems