[Daycare Nation]

Last Night's Dream
Denise Levertov

I sing tree, making green
school after school of leaf-fish
flicker between the shade and sunlight
in nets of branch,
urging the students to see, to see—

and one says: I like
the brown tree. So I look:
she has conjured
one of those scrawny northern cedars,
arbor vitae, dead or alive, one can't tell,
earth-brown, sprouting
bits of dry fern-frond from random twigs,
disregarded;

and this tree, behold,
glows from within;
haloed in visible
invisible gold.