Skip to main content

Poem: We Count Them All in Rings




     We Count Them All in Rings

I am old growth; part of a woods, not a farm.
In the woods, the old are not cut down mid-life,
leaving flattened evidence of once a tree.
In the woods, there are no horizontal abbreviations of life
to stand on, and wonder how long it might have gone. 
We crowd out, aspiring, and if our days are many,
we spread out, reaching for each other.

In the woods, there are no stumps.
There are old trees, standing still, giving back
what they have used, until wind and weakness
take them down to earth; the fallen old.
Having reached for the light, finally we fall
to rest and make home for small things,
for the mossy things.  In the old woods
there are no stumps:  there are traces.

I am old growth, like the old growth I knew
when I was a boy, where the forest farmers
had not yet come to make stubble of the woods,
where the fallen old altered the way to go,
and where we followed where deer had gone,
where the woods allowed us to go.

We did not know the shape of the land
except where the old ones had fallen from the sky,
and where creeks ran low and away. 
The woods hid horizon, except sometimes
where the land dropped away as if it too had fallen;
older still than the woods we learned on foot.

On foot we learned the ways of time,
and walked among the older generations,
silent at what they had become before we came.
They circled the slow years about themselves,
ring by ring, until wind and weariness brought them down,
where they lay, in and under the moss, returning.

I am old wood, standing amid the older still,
and the younger yet, one of the generations of woods,
accepting the seasons that filter into the woods,
enjoying them for as long as they come, here
where we count them all in rings.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more