The acorns fall
Like reign
From above
As the mighty yoke is broken
Flailing to grasp the gravity of the situation
Each won
A tiny oak
Tolled by nature
If only
Such nuts
Can hold there ground
And a void
Either being
Squirreled away
As the winter takes root
Or perhaps robin
Their shady future
I wrote this poem amidst writing another poem. I was reclining on one of the benches outside the Toledo Museum of Art, in the sculpture garden that is their front lawn. This bench happened to be under a large oak tree. There was a slow rain of acorns punctuating my experience. I was hit several times as I interrupted the arc of the acorn-gravity continuum. The squirrels seemed quite domesticated, likely due to their stomping grounds being traversed by a pedestrian highway populated by humans more civilized than normal. One squirrel, only half a dozen feet away from me, nibbled on the abundance of freshly fallen acorns, seemingly satisfied with compromising each acorn shell within grasp, taking a quick nibble, and then tossing the acorn aside. This struck me as being a bit wasteful. Yet, the scarcity of my perspective was in sharp contrast to the overabundance of acorns, of which nature unlikely intended each acorn to become a mighty oak tree. This situation reminded me of an aphorism: the mighty oak is simply a tiny nut that held its ground. Of course, in the complexity of nature, perhaps the author of this aphorism might have amended it to include something about that nut avoiding his cranium being crushed by a squirrelly beast. My daughter has a serious fright about squirrels. The origins of this fear are unidentifiable. Perhaps she was an acorn in a previous life and a squirrel nonchalantly crushed her cranium and then casually threw her aside, thinking nothing of her casualty.
Sometimes the job of a poet is to take seemingly mundane or routine occurrences and infuse them with epic meaning. While the crushing of one’s cranium by a seemingly harmless squirrel may be an apt definition of epic meaning, I look to more hopeful outcomes. In this case, it is the off-chance, against-the-odds probability that even one acorn in the season of life survives, even thrives, to become a mighty oak. From a sheer statistical point of view, this could be viewed as the fodder of a cruel joke. But, alas, after a dark, cold winter, on occasion, as predictable as rare, the surviving sun teems with such fodder to produce a mighty oak which can outlive even the many seasonings on human life. Of course, you first have to be a nut to truly believe this. And if by some miracle you survive, even thrive, you will truly be for the birds…and even overly generous to those cranium-crushing squirrels squandering your babies.
