The Earth Turns South/Green Leaves

by Clement Richardson Wood

GREEN LEAVES

For Clara Ellen Swartz

I.
We slid out of the street-locked park,—
A rolling, curving stretch of wood
May-odorous, and proudly green,—
Into cleft streets, whose bricked walls stood
In stolid death, as our machine
Skidded and righted, like some dark
Low-flying creature, fleeing a shout.
We wound and swirled and bent about,
Yet still the oddly scattered trees
Watched us, in curious disdain. . . .
And then we found a park again,
And a triumphant horde of these
Green guardians of green mysteries.

Out of the green—into the green—
And all the bricked-up blocks between
Blurred to a dulling monochrome:
Here was our first and our last home.

II.
We saw trees watch us, as we sped
Through bricked streets dying or already dead.
They were on silent sentry go,
Coolly watching the human foe.
Stiffly and silently, as we sped,
They watched with their green eyes overhead.

III.
High on a hill, as we swept by,
We saw green trees buttress the sky,
Stiff and terrible and high,
And in no human way serene.
The sky was gray, but the living sheen
Tortured our eyes. And then the keen
Unsparing sun flung his aureole
Around each rooted living soul. . . .
We scarce dared look upon the whole,
So painfully, passionately green.
But one shade brighter, and those high
Green flames would burn the tortured sky.

IV.
Circling the city's tree-cleared space
The forests peer with covetous face,
The forests creep with wolfish pace,
Faltering, wily, and yet elate.
There in their pride they crouch and wait,
A green-eyed ring of wolves, who slay
The night-bound straggler for their prey. . . .
Closer and closer they inch their way.

V.
You think a park is a fenced and clipped
Body of tree claves, manacled tight?
They will march free on their own night.
See how one venturesome root has gripped
And twisted the pavement's concrete mass,
Forcing a widening crevasse.
See how the grass between the bricks
Worries them with its gradual tricks.
See how the slow boughs reach an arm
Over the fence to things forbidden;
And the white roots keep up a hidden
Endless restlessness, groping their harm.

The seasons crowd with muffled tread;
Man will abandon the brick-walled street. . . .
The trees' triumph will be complete.
The staid blank walls will be engraved
With what the ivy creepers plaited;
There will be life where all is dead,
Life, green life, tangled and matted.
Tearing apart what man has paved,
Strange new shoots will force their way:
Life, green life, will conquer the clay.

V.
What are we
But leaves of a tree,
Pallid, fluttering leaves of a tree,
Whited and thinned,
Flung by the wind,
Torn and freed by the scattering wind,
Treading, and trod
By man and god
Into our mother and grave, the sod?

VI.
Before man was, the patient trees
Greened in the Spring, dulled in the fall.
And after us, their vivid shawl
Will cover the nude brown limbs of earth.
Their slavery to man is brief—
They will come back to the free mirth
Of unhedged stem and unclipped leaf,
Over the earth in triumph running,
Glowing green victory. Man sees
The gradual surge, and builds him poor
Oases of brick and stone and plaster—
But in the end the green is master.
And when man's hand has lost its cunning,
In some unguessed untimed disaster,
He shall lie and see the slow serene
Onward march of the army of green—
See soil and sky, and nothing between
But the endless sweep of the joyous green.