Ailanthus Poems

The Young Ailanthus

The young ailanthus tree grew in a narrow yard
Behind a rowhouse in a block facing the boulevard,
And anyone could tell it never would grow tall;
Only its shadow loomed immense at evening on the wall.
It trembled in a breeze.  It tottered in a blast.
I'd see it battered to the earth after a storm had passed.
Yet always it would rise, and to its limbs would cling
The thick white snows of wintertime and half-grown cats in spring.
In summer, lush and green, it dreamed and seemed to smile
As though it were a jacaranda on some tropic isle.
With hand-like ferns it reached outward and ever higher
Until one day its growth was stopped by the high-tension wire.
And still another day, urban renewal came,
All of the houses with their trees leveling in its name,
So you would never know, in viewing the debris
That over here stood someone's home and on this spot a tree.
Together we were young, in many ways akin,
But I do more than mourn the void where once a tree had been:
I pray that when life's storms torment and buffet me,
I find that power to survive I first knew in a tree.