Nature’s First Green
The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth.
—Simone Weil
As we wove our way inward
on that marigold June day,
our steps became sacred acts:
winding, unwinding,
feet on dirt that made us us,
dirt that also made us Earth’s.
We need only be mammals,
at home on this ground—
reverence the one demand.
We walked not toward diversion
but reconciliation,
this shape not a maze
but something else, a single
path revealing honeyed core.
In circling, we saw the same
scene several circuits:
a garden, its fence, a stand
of green trees, and obliquely
understood, or came to see,
we were being seen.
We were the woods thick with vine,
the bees, bark, and brambles.
In bloom, our yearning bodies
cast their golden thread.
Silence stilled us, then sound, for
in the center Sara sang
a song she’d learned from Zen monks
to keep the world whole.
Then, the dogwood’s early leaves
brought Frost’s poem to my lips,
and Paul, who knew it, joined in,
our voices braiding.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
and Elizabeth Bishop
kept our flame lit, true to form.
Land, in placing us,
sets us on our course: we turn
and return to live in place.
We left hand in hand, forming
a human chain to
lead us out of metaphor
back into a vaster life,
our nature changed. By nature,
nothing gold can stay.
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Gabriel Dunsmith’s poems have appeared in Poetry and are forthcoming in On the Seawall, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Vassar College, he lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.
Photo credit: Cat Gundry-Beck