Dear Acorn

How droll, to wear a thatch-work cap

in your unmade bed, half-strewn

with crumpled leaves. Were you

your mother’s favorite, 

or a shrug, earthward, tumbled 


between the seasonal cleave 

and leaving? Huzzah, 

feral tickle of taproot, encoded 

with primeval fizz! Little scuffed nut, 

your essential self, denuded, 


rockets forth—one shoot 

amid the forest graveclothes,

as if all you are may yet erupt,

may devolve or burgeon, dazed

as a spindle splintering


into rungs, arms and legs, 

brash with sap, dreaming 

the chair, turned against

each year’s lathe, 

like any artisan, becoming all throne.

kleinAcorn2.jpg

Laurie Klein is the author of Where the Sky Opens and Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh. Read more.


Laurie Klein’s “Dear Acorn” previously appeared in Vita Poetica.

Previous
Previous

Hyphae, Toadstool

Next
Next

Excerpted from “Epiphany in the Beans”