“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” -Percy Bysshe Shelley
Showing posts with label pine tree. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pine tree. Show all posts
Friday, December 18, 2015
Since Christmas is coming I have stocked up on pine candles
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.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Before this Pine is Done
When we moved here
there was a plain picket fence
and a giant pine tree
We painted the fence white
then the tree got sick
its tips tinged with red fever
Kids walk by
on their way to and from school
every day, so I made it special
I added a sprinkle of magic to the mundane
tacking up, installing a little elf door
or for fairies and dreams
All ages stop, to wait or knock
all ages smile, at her shade and hope
all ages now notice the tree
They came early one morning
parking the wood chipper outside our window,
waiting for the hour
They've claimed two others
on our street, but ours stands
in defiance and sheer self-reliance
If I could only bottle the woodsy smell
of that dripping syrup, her savory sap
it makes me drool too
And I too feel like one of the children
when I smell her sweltering bark, perfuming in the sun
making me want to simply play and run
(just for fun)
before this pines perishing time is done.
"Obsessed by a fairytale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace."-Eugene O'Neill
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