death comes with life
one white puff of wild seed
softly glides down through the air
and finds itself in the grass of our yard,
intention meets up with the random,
most of the futures a flower dreams in its heart never come true,
the seed just cannot find the way forward
as rock or wrongness meets it on the way,
the random closes off the potential of the future self,
nuts find even more challenge
in the finding of he way forward
into continued life for their genes:
the chestnut, the walnut, enough of a meal
that their future is of morphing into the creatures that eat them,
acorns try other systems,
flooding the environment with great quantities of potential,
suffusing their selves with excessive tannin
so that they're still worth eating,
but not worth savoring,
their very unpalatability must allow more to survive,
I want to celebrate the transient
beauty and hope of the floating seed,
but the tragedy of loss after loss
sings even more clearly to me,
like it did to Annie Dillard when she wrote
of being slapped in the face
by the massive amount of death
the life cycle requires.
by Henry H. Walker
August 28, ‘26
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