Locust Trees in Late May

Two of them, sixty feet high, with trunks as big around

as fifty-gallon barrels, lean at a corner of the house,

sprinkling their tiny green bur-like flowers

over the deck and during windy thundershowers

dropping their sprigs of leaves, delicate as ferns.

Just weeks ago they hummed with thousands of bees,

a sound like a huge refrigerator left in the sun.

When they were young they had fierce black

two-inch thorns, but they have since grown old

along with us and have tired of defending themselves.

Just now a nuthatch flits back and forth to the feeder,

hiding sunflower seeds in the bald, wrinkled bark,

and somehow a clump of grass has taken root

in a sap-damp crotch six feet above the ground.

Autumn is still a whole summer away, but it will come,

and with it great showers of copper locust leaves

like pennies, but oval-shaped, more like those pennies

a man at a carnival many years ago rolled through

a little machine on the tailgate of his truck

that pressed the Lord’s Prayer into them. Each of us

got only one, but these trees give us many.