Childhood

(Photography by Gage Forster - found here)

                    “It is said that in the beginning

                    is more than half of the whole.”
                    —Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle

   1.

We all grew up in mansions
or slept low under supermassive stars.

For a while, every other was a giant,
every tree a broken ladder to God,
and so, every treehouse a chapel
with its scrappy fragments of canon-leaf
scattered on the chalky floor.

   2.

A tree can be grafted only to another
of its kind while the sprig is still green.
If it survives the first cold year,
it forms a skin too thick to blend,
having layered up against a change.

The first flowering is like a rose on the grave:
a little bit of youth to commemorate the death
of something else or what could have been.

~Peter Spaulding