Your Sunday Poem

This by Nancy Willard from her 1996 book of poems, “Swimming Lessons”

What the Grass Said

All summer the trees are packing to go.
They engrave their maps on their hands.
They have thousands of hands
and no two maps are the same.

The further they travel, the less they move.
Traveling for them is throwing the maps away,
one by one till they stand naked.
You can see the sunlight through their ribs.

They don’t forget to put out buds before they go,
but even that is a way of saying goodbye,
got to make a new map out of my blood,
got to find my home on the mountain.