Your eyes see a trail of polarities

Woods grow familiar and foreign, recognizable

and unknown

If you think you know the way, your eyes close

for a dark inhale of cool rot and reckoning

and when you open them a strange season is moving

in you   An oak tree, there, ahead, splits three ways

at the base   asks, look up, up, branches reaching for

the same untroubled sky, look down, see we rooted.

Change is a seed is a force pushing, pushing up

from unconscious, breaking ground, heaving

dead matter and claiming, claiming territory. 

Can a shocking thought change your heart? 

Your fixed idea meets enchanting disruption.

Look, see where you're blind; standing above

it's a nothing little hill of fallen needles, broken

leaves lifting no particular reason. But you ask

more, look under, kneel and pay attention for 

there are levels, how they work, the shake-up

you didn't know you needed has begun

All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar 2016.