The Leaf
One leaf falls, a single leaf,
Just one, and I am there:
This leaf, this tree, and me,
And this flowing, rolling breeze
That gushes, riverine, moaning
Waves through all the sky,
And shakes the soft leaf free,
And carries it to me,
Reclining, dream-bound, in the grass.
From power, ancient, of creation,
Unseen fount of things,
Through flaming spheres condensed
From swirls of churning birth,
And harder points of mass-
Compressing, air expelling,
Falling oceans raining-
To countless ages, lives of things,
Species, lands, all slow,
Unseen, evolving, growing,
Reproducing, from beast to
Beast to man, then man
To man, and tree
To tree, vast tapestries
Ancestral of birth,
Brief life, and death,
All teeming, uncomprehensible,
Like atoms in the sea,
There converges here today
This being I call me,
This breeze, this leaf, this tree.
All the universe conspires,
Precedes, prepares for this to be:
I see this spinning leaf
Drift down off this swinging tree;
And it, now resting in my hand,
Shakes this leaf down off of me.