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Virginia Terris

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Visions

     In a grove of young spring trees across the street, I see my mother and father, my children, my friends and lovers, walking back and forth, arm in arm, in the delicate green light of the early leaves.

     The summer, with its flowers amd thunders, comes and goes. The red and gold leaves fall down on them, snow swirls about them. But spring comes again and they stoop to look at the violets about their feet. Another summer sprinkles them with warm rains. They keep walking, chatting with one another as the trunks of the trees reach farther and farther into the sky. Branches blow off in hurricanes and break under the weight of ice. Some of the trees blow over, their roots bleaching in the seasons of weather. Ferns sprout along their fallen trunks.

     Yet year after year I keep watching them as they laugh together and talk among themselves.

 


Virginia Terris is Professor of English at Adelphi University, and lives in Freeport, N.Y. She is the author of 3 books of poems, CANAL (1981) and TRACKING (1976), TURNING RIVER (1982), both the latter from University of Illinois Press. She has also edited WOMEN IN AMERICA (1980), & THE MANY WORLDS OF POETRY (Knopf, 1969), a text-anthology.

 

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