Thoughts About the Earth series
Diesel truck
struggling up the hill.
Chainsaws clammer.
Horrible ripping sounds.
My living neighbor
luckily still lives
mostly on Long Island.
He’s 210 miles,
or three and a half hours,
away.
Not hearing. Not seeing.
Not horrified for what he’s done.
He sold the land’s soul in
logging rights.
An ass, a pretty pass.
Wish he’d sold to me,
Poor, poor Johnny Appleseed,
Wish he’d sold to me.
Instead, he spiritually seceded.,
leasing off what the future needed.
Stingy, greedy
Ebenezer Scrooge from bone
to the bark. Bah humbug
to the habitat here.
Melvillian long months,
the rolling tide of
splintering wood.
Shipwrecked by sound.
The shrieking of trees.
Branches broken.
Roots wrenched.
Trees toppled.
As a getaway,
I gaze at a goldfinch.
He quietly bubbles
po-ta-to-chip
po-ta-to-chip
in a clean cadence.
The woods will revive,
regrow on its own.
Twigs sprout and tweak.
Not in my lifetime.
The earth grows to glory,
but not in my lifetime.
PHOTO: Male goldfinch (spring plumage) on forsythia bush. Photo by Jill Wellington.
NOTE FROM LYNNE: I wrote this poem about the land across the road from my home in the Great Western Catskills in Upstate New York. The logging went on for nearly two months and all the wildlife was terribly disrupted.
Published in Silver Birch Press, January 2022
