Threatened in the wild, razed for firewood, its bark
once the repository of prayers,
this Himalayan birch – planted to screen us
from our neighbour’s blind back bedroom windows
or vice versa – has, almost overnight
it seems, in a tardy autumn, turned
from pastoral green to gold, the gilt
of palaces and of temples, a wind-
shivered, aureate filigree, tear-shaped,
that burnishes the heart. When leaves have gone
bricks and pebble-dash where nothing happens
will appear obscurely as if through fingers
spread wide to mitigate the sunlight.
A sliver of bark like a leaf of paper
will catch in the bamboo beneath the tree.
Maybe this year or next we will inscribe,
with the finest brush, the Sanskrit prayer:
‘May we never quarrel!’.
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By David Selzer