Tree lore: 'Why trees are ever standing'

 Hush the swish in your leaves

Tender twig, halt your play

Young trees, slow your sway

Listen to us old wood!

"it wasn't always this cool,

The sun didn't always just shine-

It burned oh! It scorched so!

We withered and wilted and shriveled:

Great Oak and his family cracked

Cedar- all tall and hard-barked,

Bristlecone pine and any other pine

All browned away and dried;

We knelt, lowered our sapped branches

Stretched our weary stalks and just about died.

It was a sad time such-

Cut up and shipped away,

The best of us-

Demeaned and baked into charcoal,

Or lumbered into timber- that vast tomb...

Oh, and cousin Sandal Wood, butchered for perfume!

We lost our graceful poise.

The rains ceased, rivers shrunk

What a season!

Then came along a girl, she of the green heart-

Born of the enemy but turned friend indeed!

Her love green as sap, Her word was her deed.

For every broken twig, she dropped her head

If a tree fell in Karura, she shed

Tears and cried, 'No! 

Desecrate no more!

Our heritage: green beauty of earth!'

The rest is history:

-the rise of the trees, the era of green

Which you, young tree now see-

Bountiful leaves on beautiful boughs,

The earth's safe again,

The state of our nation strong!

This legacy we remember her by

-Wangari wa Maathai-

A girl born of flesh but sprouted green-

Mother of trees!

Forest queen!

Diva in green!

Forever!"

 (As told by a 100 year old Cedar tree in 2092)

My Past

Death, thou art loosed!

My head is full

Of sounds of a shovel

Of sands shoved

Of rocks moved

Of ground punched

To sink a necessary grave-

Unnecessarily too often

Too close to the last

In too dry a ceremony.

The people I’ve buried

Graves I have filled

In song-less haste

In war’s pointless waste

Death is born.

I grope in the past

And my past is lonely and vast

Furnished with misery

Well washed with tears and worry

Ventilated by gusts of terror –

my past is packed to the ceiling with

memory upon memory

loss upon loss

too often in this war-

Stacked atop each as if

they were trophies.

My past is a place

famished then abandoned

By friends and the sun and the wind.

My past is this place I can’t leave

This home I return to

This prison that shadows me

No matter the borders I cross,

This windowless trap

This smothering grip,

This past so vast

Acres and acres of evil in my mind

Poisoning where I walk

What I think, who I meet-

poisoning.

My past is a memory

the smell of blood of kin

stinging pain of singed skin

the sound of a flaring flame

of a flame crack

the harrowing fall of my life.

 With my hands I remember

burying

people I had encountered

bodies I had entered

The hearts I had warmed

In the season of love bloomed,

Lips I’d tasted; the bonds now tested

By death broken, I buried.

I remember

That I have lost to soulless sands

To silent earth

To rocks that clatter,

then roll and settle

to graves that cover

my friends whose fatal

End is an endless bother

 that I couldn’t shrug at all -

this memory so lonely and vast

Is a grave that covers me

For since then, I've been dead

Though I walk-

Thought I walk.