Primeval palm! Survivor over Earth eons -
yet still enduring in this faddish age.
So majestic in maturity you are
that one cannot contemplate your seedling stage.

Brandish your sophisticated stalwart trunk,
resplendent in solid confidence,
firmly pedestaled on solid root ball
propagating nutrition-seeking filaments.

Sculpted durable sheathing-veil overwhelms bough stubs
in circling loving bonds.
Your life-giving crown radiates leafy festooned laurel
of bending nodding fronds.

As with sundry kindred palms within moist tropic clime,
in Spring you have adorning
alluring magnificence: saffron-gold blossomed combs,
refulgent in dewy morning.

Randomly dispersing liberated pollen
snatched by insect and caressing breeze alike,
paralleled by stages of nourished growth
through successive extruding verdant spike.

Unendingly, each fresh new shaft in turn
penetrates your garland, searching for God.
Tall and rigid, ribbed and slender, robust with energy,
that fibrous shoot unflawed:

Rash young spear, waving nascent banners in verdant tuft
oblivious to temporality;
in brisk wind, not unlike lofty medieval standard,
touting arrogance and immortality.

Green with energy, now towering alone and free,
pontificating from elevated pulpit
above predecessors which, now in fronds,
droop meekly away in crowded leafy circuit.

Each branch, now bowed and undulating,
bearing phalanxed leaves by sun caressed,
once were just like you, vain sprout; each, in turn,
thought itself alone and blessed.

Arched low in humility now, propelled by zephyr -
each against the other hissing.
Savor your fleeting vitality, unformed youth;
soon these rare days shall be missing.

Directly, you too will join your modest precursors,
rustling in compliant salutation
to inevitable generation ensuing,
even now crowding out your lofty envied station.

Hence, as each pristine frond stoops in enervation
from sun, and neighbor overlaps,
a more ancient and expiring amber’d limb
in ordained extinction does collapse.

Thus do we behold you, O palm,
while from sustaining earth you in growth advance,
your life unfolds,
indifferent to our musings and episodic poetic trance.