It was a crystal blue autumn day
when we arrived to cut down your sisters and brothers.
You breathed in their cries mixed with gasoline.
You felt your mother’s roots ripped from yours as she fell.
We dragged away their corpses for our halls and walls,
our floors and heat, our writing and the
paper with which we wipe our asses.
Left you standing alone.
Left our fucking Coors Lite cans and
Pepsi bottles among the loped limbs
of your family.
We said we left you to re-seed the forest.
Or were we like the Romans, chopping off the heads
of every tenth villager they conquered.
Decimating, just because we can.
Mushrooms grew back first.
People came later to the edge of the clearcut and wept.
Their water nurtured your seedlings.
You taught a boy to stand straight and grow.
You lived for a few more years, long enough
to feel the mycillial pulses again.
I like to think you didn’t die of heartbreak
but, in the rush of spring sap, of pride.
Pride in how your grandchildren were growing up around you.
Pride in how you survived.
And pride in how, even now, you
join the earth and sky.