It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard…
I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that…
But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms.
For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
Mary Oliver, Hurricane (excerpts)
