MEANING AS AXIOM

 MEANING AS AXIOM


 If another twig falls in the night,
 as silently as it grew as a sapling
 toward the sky, would that mean
 anything anyway to anyone?
 The graveyard of a fallen tree
 may tell untold stories that stay
 untold until a struggling stray root
 breaks through dry rot and ground
 for yet another flushed cherry tree.
 The inexorable is also axiom here:
 life begins in death in a spun gyre
 twirling into flowers, forever moving.
 Nothing is everything here, but there
 where leaves had once fallen, broken
 twigs spring back as fluttering birds
 twittering on branches like new leaves.


—Albert B. Casuga
 06-03-12

 This poem was prompted by Dave Bonta's The Morning Porch (06-02-120 "Another of the dead cherry’s limbs broke off in the night, leaving just one more forked limb and a cluster of stumps, scabrous with fungi."