When I came home, there they stood,
slender, so many arms reaching, the remains of October's berries mashed on the sidewalk I’d not been around to clean. I felt a new, deep respect for what I'd once considered merely out of control "foundation plantings."

They grew from tiny balls when we bought the house,
eventually giving us shade but making a mess every spring
with dropping needles,
and every autumn
losing red berries
that my husband tracked
into the house from the three
that proved to be female.

Insects buzzed among them, humming wasps, and many birds,
cardinals, cat birds, chickadees,
bold nagging wrens,
rattling fouriously
at a porch-lounging cat,
quarreling, feeding their
late summer broods
among the spindley branches.

Exhausted, I stood lost
in a leaning graveyard
at Avebury, center
of an ancient spiral, megaliths
dikes, ditches, and barrows,
watching two men thatch
a post-and-beam House
with hanks of straw
as if Raleigh still lived,
when suddenly I noticed
the tree beneath which I stood--
a girth of twenty feet,
many conjoined trunks--
my sore feet on the slates
squashing a familiar red berry.
I stared, gasped recognition
at a yew tree that had seen
600 winters.