Newtown, Connecticut

We know that the leaves will fall

having drunk their fill from the arching sun,

they will share the infinite colors of their life

then cantilever back to the embracing earth.

But today we look up into the undulating canopy

and see too much of the Connecticut sky.

Awkward and wrong, spaces where the blue intrudes

that our hearts remind should be of green.

The green leaves fell and fell too soon.

Crisp parchment of rust and crimson and char

in gentle breezes lose their hold on now-brittle twigs

It is their time, and as much as we wish their colors

to forever grace our world, we know the leaves must fall.

But oh!  the green leaves… glossy, pliant, new

tethered tightly to branches still rich with sap

reveling in the first taste of the early spring sun…

the earth called not for these to come.

We arrive together by the tree’s rolling roots, mourning

that we will never know the final colors of these twenty,

never hear the wind sing through them, never bless their shade

and we cry “By whose hand have we lost so much?”

The tree whispers back “Not by my hand.

I held tight through the storm, and my sap still runs

from the wound that will always remain.

They have been taken from me too soon, too soon…”

The breeze sighs back “Not by my hand.

I sang with them from their first days, tickling them

as they stretched and reached and grew…

It was not yet my time to escort them home.”

We gather the green leaves from the ground,

and stare at our own hands, the awful revelation

coursing like a runaway fever through our veins

as God confirms:  “Not by My hand, but by yours.

It was by My hand that these twenty were born

from the bud of the tree, to suckle on the sun’s dry warmth

to dance in the breeze, to find their own colors to share in time…

It was not by My hand that the green leaves fell, but by yours.”

We know that — in their time — all leaves will fall,

that the cycles of their lives, and ours, are all too brief…

but if our mourning is not hollow now, and our hearts

not too quick to forget our pain, then answer we must

Why the green leaves fell, and fell too soon.