The Reason Poem by Romella Kitchens

i think one of the most beautiful things i ever saw as a child was Chestnuts beneath a Chestnut tree.

i was new to this, the less ready nuts having fallen around it, its skin was dark and as beautiful as the Western red cedar yet even darker as it lay there on the ground.

i picked it up the sun having warmed it,
it warmed my hand.
it warmed my palm in the most splendid, unexpected manner.

So much of life was hard...
We were not wanted where we were due to a
covenant.

Yet such beauty. Such beauty.

i rushed the Chestnut home, walking carefully my arm out stretched,
this beautiful thing in my palm.

i showed my mother.
She was delighted and told me what it might be.

my father came looked at it through his eyeglasses then smiled.
He returned with a worthy encyclopedia.

We three sat on the kitchen bench and read about Chestnut trees, their nuts, their season,
that chestnuts can be roasted and eaten.

Supposedly extinct but maybe there this season for its children's sake.

Maybe silent beyond lumber yards and nut crops,
not suspecting humans might hurt it for wood, food
if it had selected anywhere else as home.
We were told later there were more.

We enjoyed it so.

This one non-violent beautiful thing, when where we had moved from there had been little more than deadly violence.