The original poem:

From An Upstairs Window

The gum leaf in question
lives twelve feet outside
my first floor window
between earth down below
and God whose above
if anywhere.

His sunlight maps
its spine, veins, capillaries,
fills its translucent flesh
with life.

It flutters to and fro
like a hypnotist’s bauble
and suddenly I’m rapt
in the exotic world
of His leaf.

I’m released, I think,
by a breeze that stirs the whole tree
sets leaves to dance in fractal harmony,
altogether less disturbing
than a one-leaf world.

In the summer yard below
a mingy chicken pecks at the Earth
as if to punish:   so there   so there   so there
while working its way around
a red wheelbarrow.

Suddenly, the chicken goes
from startle-white to melancholic-gray
in the deep shade of my leaf
and some others.

The kernel:

blazing sun
a white chicken fades
into shadow

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