Luther's Legacy

Father, you loved trees; 
indicated their beauty 
to those who could not see


took cuttings from Holly, Rhododendron, Azalea 
thousands, set them into the sand to 
grow in your steamy old greenhouses


bending young branches just-so 
testing flexibility, sap content 
precisely pruning at nodes.


You carried tree-lore 
into parenting with 
continuous perfectionism


pruning the limhs of my brother 
sister & I into stand-tall 
clean-cut Lutherans.

We were your first Bonsai's 
shaped with tensile wires which 
we strained to snap

but you had started at our 
roots. Thank you for 
aiming us at the sun.

You left us a living legacy of leaves 
green & glowing; 
gave us love of polished riverrocks 
laid in curving replicas of 
long-ago mountain streams; taught us to interrrupt the 
monotony of lawns with ponds 

real or imagined.


Thank you for dragging slabs of 
grey slate into summer-patio shapes, 
for stacking it into horizontal shelves 
among the boxwood cedars and 
setting low flat square or oval 
cobalt-blue chinese pots containing 
10,20,30 year old Bonsai trees