When the Plum Tree Blossomed

    by Kenneth Salzmann

No one saw the plum tree this year ease

into its cloak of springtime blossoms

in the same week the forsythia

proclaimed the sun, in the same week

the hospital demanded all the living

we could muster. No one watched new buds

prepare for lace in the ironic promise

of fruit that will not come in later spring.

There was a year when plums formed and

dropped from this isolated, barren tree

despite the certainties of borrowed science,

and there have been years spent far from

the hospital and far from ironic promises

of a spring that never stops arriving,

each time to blossom and bear fruit against

familiar probabilities. No one saw the plum

tree come into full bloom this year;

even so, it remains our godly gift

to watch over it while each petal falls

and each tender leaf searches for its shape.

© 2011  Kenneth Salzmann

+ previously published in Cyclamens and Swords

Kenneth Salzmann is a writer and poet who lives in Woodstock, NY, and Ajijic, Mexico. His poetry has appeared in Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude, Rattle, The New Verse News, Section 8, and elsewhere.