Passage

Cradled below the branches
by ropes woven in winter
knowing the sun would return
as it must
if hope is still to be found
like the blossoms that return
and small buds, first green
then red; the apple that promises
all will pass through hell
and find again
that space of air and sunlight.

I swing in the hammock
tease a collision
between body, rope and tree trunk
recall a season, eons ago
when my son was four
and the oak leaves of another garden
in another house
littered the ground, became a plaything
for my son and I

and she watched from the porch
smiling then, love still present
in her green eyes.

It faded,
like the hammock’s rope,
though I never noticed
not until it was replaced and I fell,
she is now absent, my son too
a man, the child long gone.