When will you learn, myself, to be <br />a dying leaf on a living tree? <br />Budding, swelling, growing strong, <br />Wearing green, but not for long, <br />Drawing sustenance from air, <br />That other leaves, and you not there, <br />May bud, and at the autumn's call <br />Wearing russet, ready to fall? <br />Has not this trunk a deed to do <br />Unguessed by small and tremulous you? <br />Shall not these branches in the end <br />To wisdom and the truth ascend? <br />And the great lightning plunging by <br />Look sidewise with a golden eye <br />To glimpse a tree so tall and proud <br />It sheds its leaves upon a cloud? <br /> <br />Here, I think, is the heart's grief: <br />The tree, no mightier than the leaf, <br />Makes firm its root and spreads it crown <br />And stands; but in the end comes down. <br />That airy top no boy could climb <br /> <br />Is trodden in a little time <br />By cattle on their way to drink. <br />The fluttering thoughts a leaf can think, <br />That hears the wind and waits its turn, <br />Have taught it all a tree can learn. <br />Time can make soft that iron wood. <br />The tallest trunk that ever stood, <br />In time, without a dream to keep, <br />Crawls in beside the root to sleep.<br /><br />Edna St. Vincent Millay<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-leaf-and-the-tree/
