Thoughts in the Garden

______________________________

This does not feel like temptation.
This does not look or smell or sound or feel
like temptation.
It hangs from the lower limbs
Like a welcome sign–
A Welcome to something other than
what I’ve known.
And this welcome is not the red
Of blood, “sin”, or fire:
It is the red of a sunset, of laughing lips,
of a cardinal’s flirting feathers.

I have been told temptation is irresistible,
Tuggling with your brain,
a shadow of something wrong that feels right.
But I feel no fear here, only trust
That there’s another will working,
A Will shaping this fruit into a seed
of something newer, fresher, and more real.

What matters here is not instructions
or any single power.
What matters here is only nature.

From Branches

____________________

Perishing leaves fall slowest of all.
They drift quietly in the zig zag of a breeze
while passersby sidestep them,
barely see them,
and the ground drifts up
more slowly than they’d imagined it could.

Having drifted to death upon familiar homes,
the already dead fall swiftly,
without question,
cracking on their journey down
and landing directly below their old
mourning branches.
They fall silently,
without regret,
hardened to what will come
and what’s already passed.

The fully alive are nearly as quick,
in denial of their lost branches
as the ground rushes up.
They’re befuddled by rain and wind and careless hands,
the elements that have torn them free
to drop them on the ground,
the leaves still thinking they’ll find a way
to not die, to survive the latest fall.

There is no right way to fall,
but perhaps the slow fallers are luckiest.
Not fully decayed,
they’ve got the moments and the time
to understand their journey, pain not yet set in,
meandering, the drop just a movement resisting
the wind and the fall.

____

Jennifer Collins’ poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including Puerto Del Sol, The Rockford Review, Chelsea, Barbaric Yawp, Miller’s Pond, Nerve Cowboy, Redivider, The Diner, 13th Moon, and Post Poems, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.