This is a collaboration with Frank Hubeny, whose poem “Park Shade” provided a lot of inspiration. It is a Chaucerian stanza, iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ababbcc. I enjoyed trying this unfamiliar form, and Frank’s original gets better with every reading. For Jilly’s October collaboration challenge.

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You grew in what became a picnic grove
Providing shade to what is now a park
While dying you were cut and when I drove
One morning past your place expecting dark
I found the stump, your tombstone, your new mark
And knew eventually that so will I
Look up with new perspective on the sky.

I took for granted your inviting shade, 

Your stately trunk and verdant, kindly leaves,

A vacuum where I’d expectations made, 

An unexpected absence nature grieves, 

Much worse than winter’s cold, and icy eaves.

In winter’s bitter cold will our tears freeze

Time before such loss brings us to our knees?