Childhood Revisited Poem by Salvatore Ala

For orange jewelweed one flower
Is still a flowering plant

The youngest deer of the forest
Hear everything
With the transparent leaves of their senses

A red-spotted purple
Flies away with the sky

A paper wasp barely moves
The leaf on which it lands

A dead branch bursts
Into decaying life

Green frogs stretch
The gulp of their voices
Across the stream

Ferns brush themselves
Into the undergrowth

In nature the children
Of our shadows
Remember us as we were