Near the End of October

For Brianna

From our Greek apartment, Brianna peers out the window.
We’re passing quickly through October, lashing
poetry with sentiment.

Twenty-somethings and already these seasons are nostalgic.
She remembers a different afternoon, ten-years old,
retuning home from school

to find her backyard full of acorns. Her working parents,
abstract and distant, forgotten now. Only the taste
of blowing leaves real.

She gathered acorns in wool pockets. Sketching in her mind
the branches they would grow as she planted each,
steadier more often than the future.

She hoped for an oak grove. Never expecting then,
the real sanctuary life would require. Only asked
for thin sprouts, saplings.

But we grow more than seeds. Risking early winter,
we rise each morning despite our best misgivings
as roots emerge shallow, hardened.

Everything we own can be transplanted. Still we travel
across oceans, write letters home and from cold
afternoons, send back this often coming breeze.