Special Edition: Our Private Devastation

(P1,2,3) Poetical, Philosophical, Political

Before...

All The Trees Gone

All those great welcoming trees behind our house,

How Like Gerard Manley Hopkins’
Binsley Poplars felled in 1879,

They so suddenly have cut them, chipped them
Carted them away in big-bellied hearses,

Cremains hurtling down the diesel-smelly highway
To be mixed with glue and particle-boarded

To become somebody’s cheap cabinets and end tables.

“O if we knew but what we do
When we delve or hew”

Nothing is ever lost – except the grandeur, the life,
The peace, the birds, the oaks,

Our neighbors, our teachers, the parts of us they were,
What paid silent witness to us, our lives

“When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene”

Such needless phantom pain each time
We gaze out windows to where they stood,

Where the red-tailed hawks clutching tall eucalyptus
Calculated the scurrying prey. All gone

Gone the hawks, the occasional osprey,

Gone the small birds, the colonies of fourteen
Woodpeckers gathering and storing acorns.

We learned they colonized, two breeders
And a dozen other screeching flying flames.

Gone the deer that came to us for apples,
Some limped from brushes with the traffic,

Gone the big racked bucks that watched
Over fearlessly foraging fawns.

Gone forever the foxes, the rodents, the skunks.

This is where, armed with our Audobons,
We learned of migration from towhees,

Bluejays, juncos, and swifts.
Are we to lose our family –

The hummingbirds, vultures, the mourning doves
Awakening us each day with plaintive love songs?

The quail?
Each year when a new family marched single file

Along our back fence, each year and again
They were “Dan, Marilyn, and Kids.”

I never imagined this poem might be
The most difficult for me to sit through its writing.

Its necessity invades as a matter of duty.
How simple next year or in centuries hence

To retain no image of what stood for so much.
Such a sin of omission I will not commit

In spite of the pain and the tears and the memory.
All that we’ve had. All that we’ve lost.

“Not spared, not one”

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