By Wesley Houp
The sun has taught
some of its children how
to conquer death.
Where twayblades rose
in abundance,
now a blanket of
yellowing cinnamon ferns.
Soon leaves cover
the slope.
The winter star a dirge.
When I was a child,
my father
photographed a colony
of showy orchids
blooming through
April snow.
A marvel he proclaimed.
More than forty years
have passed like a season.
Men blossom and
die off rootless,
never returning to
woods and hills, their memory
carried in the faulty
vessel of others’
memory until
the last seeps away.
Orchids die back,
the woods and hills
retreating with them,
to simple sleep
that never forgets how to live again.
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