Winter Orchard Fragment

Stomari

Apr 01, 2026

At the far edge of the dream
there was an orchard in winter.

No fruit yet.
Only the architecture of waiting—
branches lifted into the pale air,
roots busy below the frost line,
the whole field filled
with a stillness that felt almost spoken.

I walked between the rows
with the sense that I had come late
to a conversation already underway.

Nothing asked to be explained.

The trees stood in their own knowing.
The ground held what it held.
The light moved softly
from trunk to trunk
as though reading a text
written beneath appearance.

By spring, I knew,
someone would stand at the fence
and speak of abundance.

They would be right.

The fruit would be there.
The color would arrive.
The branches would lean
under their own luminous answer.

Yet the orchard was already speaking now,
in this spare hour,
in this inward season
when all visible proof
still slept inside the roots.

I think some works live this way.

They come to us in their flowering,
and flowering is glorious.
Still, their deepest life
began long before bloom—
in the buried exchange,
in the faithful tending,
in the slow education
through which a hand, a body, a spirit
learns the terrain so completely
that response becomes immediate,
gentle, exact.

So the blossom appears in public.

The root keeps its own counsel.

And the one who stayed through winter
hears in the flowering
what others call beauty
and also something more intimate:

the old underground language
finally rising into light.

S☾