Folks, my friend Sarah, who comments here sometimes, lost her dad today after he suffered a sudden and massive stroke this morning.

I’m sure she and her family would appreciate any good thoughts or prayers you can spare in the hard days to come.

The Day the Tree Fell Down
          ~ Jack LaZebnik

crumbling. It died of old age,
I tell you, like a man. We wept.
We had worn our time upon it, put
our arms around to touch fingertips
and we measured ourselves, our feelings
on the years. We made our calculations
pay, then. Now, the fears, age,
daily mathematics. The tree held
the green. Birds, squirrels, coons
made memory there until the day it fell.
They got out. It groaned for twenty minutes.
I tell you, it sighed as it bent,
its branches catching the dull fall,
the soft turning in wet dissolution.
the body lay exposed: a gut of grubs,
a lust of hollowness. We wept,
as I say, more than it was called for.