John Popielaski
One by One
Let’s just say humanity has not been kind
to trees. You know exactly who I don’t mean.
I don’t mean a member of an ancient nation
who spent days on foot evaluating birches,
choosing one that he would fell with stone tools and fire
and then fashion into a traditional canoe.
The list of who I mean
is longer than what used to be the phone book.
Oak trees in the Fertile Crescent
lost it all to wizards of the new ideal.
I had to read the epic poem twice
to realize I hated Gilgamesh
for humanizing the desire
to humiliate the Cedar Forest.
All the versions of the Loess Plateau and Borneo.
All the disinherited spirits frazzled in the dells.
What a forest was to Governor Winthrop,
what a forest was to Merriweather Lewis,
a forest cannot be to you and me.
I hate initials etched in bark
and see each carver one day falling in
a thermal pool in Yellowstone
as bison topped with cowbirds
model symbiosis in the distance.
Other work by John Popielaski