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Taming the Wind
Judith Deem Dupree
Wind whips at trunks and wrestles branches;
a willful thing that knows no boundaries
but its own breath and the buttress
of the thrusting hills. A wild thing, it tears
at every dark shape, scrapes the barren soil
with claws and teeth drawn, purges the sage,
strips Manzanita down to brittle bone.
When it falls at last to a whimper, collapses
with a stutter at the eaves, there will come
a silence the world first knew in Eden,
when The Tree of Life thrust up like a plume,
a graft of feathers - - a great wing lofting;
when laughter braided through It, danced
across the shimmering leaves, rang like a song
through the silent universe . . . and the wind
bowed down, bowed down and slept before it.
2/21/11
At the Alumni House, PLNU
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