Green Questions by Rachel Hadas

Green Questions

Before I knew it, I had reached the navel
of the labyrinth and turned to leave,
retracing my steps. What had seemed small
simply by my staying in one place
got bigger. Meandering this way and that,
the path traced what kept feeling like a choice.
Noiselessly one maple leaf twirled down
onto my shoulder – harbinger of more
but verdant still, a juicy bright deep green.

Fall’s paradoxical economy:
do time and distance actually shrink,
or does it only seem to work that way?
Everything is minute and fugitive.
The questions being asked in this green light
go unanswered. Ethan clears the last
remnant of the massive ghostly tree
he and Wes the forester took down
last night before it got too dark to see:
a hundred-year-old hemlock, give or take,
something over sixty feet tall.

Those distant summers when I was a child,
a few last weathered rungs were visible
nailed to its trunk. These like a ladder led
to some high perch where children must have played,
sheltered in their treehouse, with a view
of Pumpkin Hill, the valley, and the road.
What did they hear high in their hemlock nest?
What were the green questions of their own
season? The tree was rotten, hollow, dead,
says Ethan. It was time we cut it down.

*

Rachel Hadas is a poet, essayist, translator, and editor. The most recent of her many books is PASTORALS (Measure Press, 2025). A prosimetrum, MY CLOAK IS POETRY, is due out from Able Muse Press in 2026. An emerita professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, Hadas divides her time between New York City and Vermont. rachelhadas.net