Editor’s note: For the third year running, our friend and local poet Elisabeth Wenger wrote a beautiful poem to help us celebrate Future Festival. She’s become the Huss Poet Laureate. Thank you, Elisabeth!
Come! Let me embrace you in my arms of gentle rage,
taught as bowstring, tight as catgut,
a tug you and I both recognize.
Let me hold you close so you can hear
the rustle of the wind in the leaves
of the small trees, as it turns over itself,
“Fools, fools, they do not realize, the parking lot is not
yet soil. The frost has not heaved up a space
for crabgrass, tall foxtails, for anthills
to accumulate. And though the wisdom of seeds
outweighs the weight of their age,
a seed that young cannot sprout.”
But I understand your impatience to get going,
to start in. I feel it too.
And who’s to say it is not wise? The potato
sits in silence in my pantry all winter long,
warm on the dark shelf, and only when spring arrives
does it sprout, anticipatory, wasteful,
though seasons do not come into the back of my pantry.
Throw enough apples and the ground would rise,
a sticky sauce, a pulp above which bees
drunken mumble that this is not the way
it used to be. Throw enough apples
into the empty parking lot, the insects
and the small tunnelers would turn it again
to soil, the pavement buried, a base, a beginning.
and the wind in the leaves turns over itself again,
“Fool, fool, my pretty fool,
keep throwing apples. And one day
the seed in one you throw will take root,
grow, and spread its branches out,
to bear more apples for throwing.”
There is always enough, and
there is always more than enough.