They all said it was dead.
The marks were obvious signs. The color,
bad news. Nothing could be done.
We knew after consulting with the experts
the day was coming,
but it was out there somewhere, solid and waiting,
until that day became today.
Needles glistened red in the sunrise,
the birds stayed away,
yesterday there were thirty crows
don't tell me a bird brains don't know.
Sure its pusy sap has made a mess,
parking under there a last resort,
but the smell and shade worth the week-
ends raking, complaining, venting,
and meditating on the smells.
The gang was all there prepared
to greet its last day the moment it broke,
move it or lose it, officially tagged
no parking here today.
Neighbors gather around like vultures
just outside the attack lines, the cone zone
pacing, bleary eyed.
And some have wheelbarrows
to take pieces of the carcass for themselves.
The orange man in the boom box
bobs and weaves while he makes
his perfect cuts with moving precision.
A chef on deck asea.
They are operating ruthlessly as I write this,
my son still asleep under its bossom soon
mastectomized. The windows are behind
plywood, in case a limb fights back.
Our mailboxes are gone for the day
Christmas is on its way, deliveries delayed.
This is no time for merry anyway.
Fifty feet tall and forty years of giving breath,
gone in a days work of slaughter and toil.
The crane in the sky screeches
as it chokes off major arteries
as a support staff of the savage surgery.
We were hoping for some empathy,
gloves instead is what we get, a slab for the back,
a souvenir, they said.
I'm hunkered down, don't want to look,
honestly I've never had one this big die on me.
I didn't know my breath would be taken instantly,
from piney oxygen deprivation.
When there's a hole, an empty space
in my skyline, I'll know
those mounds, like shallow graves
will mark the place of a time
where a perfect pine used to grow,
one that I called mine,
and the gnomes called home.
*If you have not read already, Before this Pine is Done was composed in tribute to this same deceased tree now resting in heaps.
Top image credit: By Jon Sullivan [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
