One Single Impression: Copse

Dusk has come.

I walk and

Rabbits the color of forgotten hay

Dart into the undergrowth

The soundless doe and her fawn

Slip into the slender shadows

Of the copse

That keeps the river

Cool and dark

The waters slow to a whisper.

Birds on the outer branches

Of this secret place

Silence themselves

As my footfall sends

A shiver through the earth.

The fish feel the echo

Rippling through water.

A fox slips through the grass

And the geese step into

The cool dew of day's end.

Everything disappears

Into the shelter of trees.

In the distance, a dog barks.

A baby cries.

I stand still, stand back,

Hold my breath

And wait for silence

To carry off these voices.

The retreating thunder

Of my steps

Is the last sound

Before darkness claims

The sleeping universe

That casts me back out

Onto the unlit street.

I discovered this week that the word copse comes from a Latin word meaning to cut. So a copse is a small wood grown for the purpose of cutting. How and why this brought my thoughts to the works of Margaret Wise Brown and her bedtime stories for children--Goodnight, Moon, A Child's Good Night Book, The Big Red Barn, The Sleepy Book, Wait 'Til the Moon is Full, The Sleepy Little Lion--that have a lovely way of placing the sleepy child in a wonderful, settled, sleeping world where all is well, I don't know. I like to walk in the evening just as it seems the world is going to sleep. Except that I often feel like a heavy, oafish intruder as I move along. Quite the opposite of all those wonderfully assuring things I used to read to my daughter. I don't know.

One Single Impression