Isolated Leaf

On a tree a lone leaf

that perhaps wishes to entrust a grief

to some soul magnanimous enough to consider

the dignity of nature’s lowly twig furnisher:

its fellows are shrivelling below

and it won’t live to see the new green grow.

‘I half wonder,’ it said

‘if my sin was refusing to drop dead,

for the dead are the more alive when life is dark,

but to die is to lose the things we mark;

yet now my home’s barren and I’m alone,

O had I only been moss on a stone

then so much more miniscule would I have grown,

come wild wind, can I not be downward blown?’

Being only a leaf it hadn’t much

considered sin a subject it should touch;

but now it wondered if the last leaf on the tree

had stubbornly refused to flee

a temporary hospitality,

the tree no more permanent than the wind,

would not its fate be better if twinned

to the other leaves which seemed binned,

for those that die though their substance feeds earth,

they’ll live again by a true birth

into that realm that has weighed their true worth;

even the littlest thing might have eternal life

in bliss abounding heaven, rife

with angels and harps and rivers of honey.

‘I see you’re a bit gloomy, sonny,’

said the gardener coming across the leaf.

‘the last leaf here! May you be guarded from the wind, that thief,

for a leafless tree is a desolate grief,

O if life were more than a little brief

I’m afraid I’d be robbed of belief,

for long age sees long gloom,

but the human heart has no room

for despair to long sing of doom.’

‘Good sir, I am just a little leaf, will

you put my fears to still?’

said the leaf, ‘I feel the wind’s chill

and reckon I nature is ill,

at least to see the rose wither and die,

not so much to hear a bird’s sweet sung cry,

though it’s a tear when one falls from the sky–

I fear I was to join my kin below,

that to hang alone on this tree is woe.

Will winter not be spring, spring not be summer,

and, as for summer, will not joy outsum her?’

‘O little leaf, all will be well,’

said the gardener, ‘do you not know all will be well?’