Two weeks a year the trees reveal their labor
smuggle buds from branch to branch trading winter
for blushing snow. These are candy trees, bearing
no fruit but the blossom, brief as paper,
and the woman in me feels this loss.
The child who can’t read the do-not-climb
signs trusts the leaves to make her home
anywhere, and the branch, to hold.
Evening draws a simple conversation
between one star and another, petals
unfolding futures with every breeze.
We face the living and unknown.
What beauty, that we recognize
to be alive is to be blown away.
Adrianna Smith is a DC native, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and The Scores. She has an MLitt from the University of St. Andrews and a BA from Georgetown University, where she was a Fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Practice.