A Walk through the Woods

This is a “stolen lines” poem, created from lines “stolen” from a class collection of poems

If something sounds familiar, it probably is.

We stroll past the colors that transform a field
sometimes green and sometimes gray.
Where the sky is a page of water
with an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity free of reflection.

We search out every horizon
through a veil of distance
in this vast and wondrous land
where everything is clear and still.

Now into the forever shadows,
the canopy lush and thriving above, a carpet beneath our feet
something less tangible courses here,
as we wander through woods that hold no breeze.

The soil is full of marvels and above it,
buckeyes, sycamores, and one black walnut
let their cello depths emerge from the cycle we call life.

Nature, great providder of the rainbow, sends
saffron leaves rusting, cresting into their moment
red-brown pine needles inches thick, a black beetle quick
to burrow back under the rich brown loam.

We listen, we believe,
oh stranger of the future,
oh friend of yesterday,
while a kind of twilight begins to permeate the air

As one hour sweeps into the next,
here it’s proven that time requires
this fleeting moment of eternity be savored — where
fact and fiction are indistinguishable in the moonlit night.