September 20, 2013

• Elegy

  These island woods have given up the ghost
  The only growth a mindless alder-shoot
  As sickness from the south and west
  Floats in on warmer rain and snow enroute
  To northern lakes

  The last great conifers are choked
  By resurrected remnants of ancestral crush
  Slurried into enormous furnaces and then up-smoked
  Far from mid-western streets forloned by soot and slush
  To fall as poisoned flakes

  The matchless brilliance of long-past dawns
  Once fresh with jewel-drops of uncorrupted fog
  Is but a heart-rent memory now shorn
  Of all its loveliness - a septic bog
  A pestilence thought dead awakes

  These mournful woods they creak and moan
  Their cankerous malignancy now obvious for all to see
  But no one comes and they are left alone
  Exhausted in their ennui
  Elegiac of man's mistakes

  • 9:52 am
  • 1 Comment