Elegy Of Lemon Trees When Winter Ends

The pale white lemon blossoms jerk to life,
fooled by false promises of early spring,
all bright and brilliant, shimmering in white,
they spew lovely fragrance to dancing breeze.
Visions of sweet nectared fruit course their veins;
limbs, boughs, and twigs rush life giving juices,
fill cracks and crevices with faith filled hope,
the kind that does not think of tomorrow.

It is the next day when dull clouds roll in,
foreboding blanketers of dying sun,
stifling monsters exhaling frigid air.
Winter returns with all its latent lies.
Too late the blossoms understand their fate.
Too late they fight to save themselves the pain.
Too late they lose their helpless grasp of life.
One by one they drift dying to the ground.

The earth is covered with a sea of white,
a field of crosses on a thousand graves.
Like massive shrouds they whitewash barren roots,
a million dead with others yet to fall.
Resurrection seems little more than myth.
The whistling winter winds shout out the lie,
the vicious lie that this is all there is.
Behold those silly fools who disbelieve.

Such are the ways of resurrection days,
appearing after winter strikes its blow,
that final shock that ends all hope of life.
“How can it come again?” the scoffers ask,
“See, there is no fruit upon the branches.”
And, truth be told, we can’t imagine it,
for we know where all the flowers have gone,
decaying, decomposing in the muck.

A day goes by, then maybe two or three,
when hope becomes a fading memory,
a story’s end, where all just fades to black.
Then blasting brilliant comes a sunny day.
New blossoms burst and turn the tree to white,
a million tiny orbs quick turn to gold.
A tree, all weighted down with yellowed fruit
for after death, there’s rising up again.