Yet Another Poem About Trees

By Larry Needham

“Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!”

—Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity”

 

Before the jar
the anecdote
and Tennessee,

wilderness.
Forests primeval,
grim and awful—

extravagant
as first growth
imaginings.

The Dark Ages.
Then dominion
bleaker still.

Maps, surveys,
plots, deeds, sub-
plots, divisions;

trees measured,
monetized,
milled to spec;

scaffolding
raised up, torn
down, tossed into

the burn barrels of
histories
declining on

the ash heap
crematoria
of woodlots

warming the near
reaches of
advancing night.

_____

Hard to admit
the bleak truth of
a twilight

premonition:
Birnam Wood
departing

that one cast shade on
clear-cut fell
ambition,

slash-and-burn
madness, doubtful
illuminations

kindled in darkness,
guttering in
airless corridors,

all talk of
tomorrows
sucking up

the oxygen,
and, at the end,
no one left to

breathe a word about
equities,
justice or

what followed in
un-natural
succession:

birthright woods
supplanted and
the newly planted

contracted to
an oak on crutches
and hollowed-

out sycamore, mere
stand-ins for
a tired allusion.

_____

The witness
to dark times
wasn’t wrong about

its silences,
indifference,
cold imperatives,

having weathered
the flood—too avid,
perhaps, for landfall

too hopeful of
olive branches,
rainbow signs and

fruitful generations-—
unmindful of the
fire next time,

new dark ages and
a certain justice in
our sad leave-taking.

In blindness or
naked disregard
he was not unlike

the rapt poet of trees
and makers before
The Great War who

couldn’t see death in
the Aisnes and Ardennes
forests for his Trees

and never thought he’d
ever see an end to
first-growth woodlands

or dream that there
could possibly be
future times without

green canopies,
sublimity, poems,
posterity.

 

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Larry Needham is a retired community college teacher who has published on Romantic literature and the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. His work has recently appeared in a handful of online journals including: Amethyst Review, The Alchemy Spoon, and Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

Photo credit: Thomas H via a Creative Commons license.

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