Issue > Poetry

Clela Reed

Clela Reed is the author of The Hero of the Revolution Serves Us Tea (Negative Capability Press, 2014), Dancing on the Rim (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2009), and two chapbooks: Bloodline (Evening Street Press, 2009) and Of Root and Sky (Pudding House Publications, 2010). She has had poems published in The Atlanta Review, Caesura Literary Magazine, Colere Journal, Storysouth Journal, Clapboard House Literary Journal and others. She lives and writes with her husband in her forest home near Athens, Georgia.

Beech Leaves In Winter

Most of what I know of God
is in the pale leaves of the beech tree,
the way they hold on all winter,
golden in sunlight against drab trunks
and empty branches,
       warm clouds layered
through the gray-cold of the forest.

Marcescense, the botanists call it:
An absence of barrier skin
where leaf joins limb.
       Without it, release rips open wounds,
so the leaves hold tight
       against the winds and rain,
let the snow clump and then melt away,
endure.

I know intent belies the science,
but what accounts for beauty?
And what in their flickering light lifts in me
both courage and inexplicable sadness?