Sarah Ashbach

Leaves Below Giants

Outside, we left our rushed and petty things—

gift shops, a rental car which scraped the ground,

days cheaply lost. In red groves, silence brings

time’s woody notes to something like a sound,

even as time, unnoticed as a ghost,

slips by and shivers past the road-wide trees,

sometimes as eel-quick as the river, but most

often, as slow as fog. We stopped to seize

our own impermanence there, though outside,

the tired world wheeled along its noisy way,

and though, returning to it, we might hide

from knowledge of our bondage to each day.

But in the woods, sun-tossed, a brown leaf fell

to rest, more quietly than I might tell. 

Sarah Ashbach teaches at a classical Christian school and is currently an MFA student with the University of St. Thomas. Her poems have appeared in Ekstasis, The New Lyre, and The St. Austin Review, and she is the 2024 recipient of the Frost Farm Poetry Prize.