Speaking Soleil
By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 2/29/08
When the thrush quickly lights on and departs from
The plum branch, snow-pink plum blossoms
Detach themselves and breezily flutter down, down and down.
Like some beautiful, fluttering young woman’s lithesome laughter.
They write on the lime-green lichen of the tree trunk,
And upon the English ivy, and upon the cushions
Of moss that compose the territory, the mind,
Of the tree. They write certain phrases of joy and yearning
In the special language of blossoms. Please do try
To understand. The thrush, a singer,
But in this instance, no poet, is not the author
Of these phrases, nor is the tree, nor is the breeze, the sun is.
His polyglot pronouncements are as fluent
In Blossom as they are in Thrushsong or in Beehum,
Or as in the showery flutter of a young woman’s laughter,
And it is to his august sonorities that we
A-tune ourselves, even in so small and light
A thing as a plum petal. He is not loud, but he
Is mighty, and we, standing in the subtle blare
Of his golden presence, beneath the blossoming tree,
Hear that message from the motions of the stars,
In words as tiny as the tip of a finger and as large
As the blue pavilion of sweet heaven.
