Looks Like Faith

Chill southern winds shove and pummel grand leafing maples, stately cedars and firs, day after day from one month into another, cracking off thick limbs, hurling them to sodden ground impaled by deadwood spears, strewn with ragged branches,

some tipped abundantly with leaf buds as firm and flush as magnolia, fat with futile purpose. Dwarfed fruit trees—an apple, a pear— without choice, raise translucent petals, sturdy as moth’s wings, to this fierceness.