He woke, as before, a boy.
She told him he would be a man,
As his father was out cutting turf,
And his mother told him the story,
He had heard before by the fire.
No pages to this book, not a leaf.
When he was younger, this boy
Had once cut, alone, the turf.
But upon placing it in the fire,
He decided instead to burn the mother of the leaf,
And that he did not want to be a man.
He couldn’t tell himself her story.
He saw his mother, an aspen leaf
Trembling by the fire,
As what was deemed a man
Turned her blackened eyes into a story.
He had always resembled a boy
Even to his own son, who pressed his tear-stained face into the turf.
His father tried to prove the boy a man
But found instead that he was hardly even boy.
So drink hid him from the story
While the not-boy cried by the fire
Knowing that he could not touch his fathers turf.
It was not like a man to shake as if a leaf.
The not-boy decided again not to be a man,
And lying in the earth found a fire
Inside that showed him a story
He had told himself as a boy
In which those who were only leaves
Could not have their own turf.
He was not the only boy
Who did not understand “man”
None did, and instead told a story
About how only the strongest leaf
Would cut the turf
And that only women would tend the fire.
Boys do not cut turf.
Leaves fall and we still tell stories
Of how fire somehow makes a man.
