What the Leaf Told Me
Today I saw the word written on the poplar leaves.
It was ‘dazzle’. The dazzle of the poplars.
As a leaf startles out
from an undifferentiated mass of foliage,
so the word did from a leaf—
A Mirage Of The Delicate Polyglot
inventing itself as cipher. But this, in shifts & gyrations,
grew in brightness, so bright
the massy poplars soon outshone the sun . . .
‘My light—my dew—my breeze—my bloom’. Reflections
In A Wren’s Eye.
Copyright Credit: Ronald Johnson, “What the Leaf Told Me” from The Book of the Green Man. Copyright © 1967 by Ronald Johnson. Used by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson.
Source: The Book of the Green Man (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1967)