Reincarnation ~ OSI
Christine November 16th, 2009
Dark against blue sky
starker than deep green
alarming because of how colors define life.
Red like a flag of alert
or a call of distress
the red death of pines
who still stand but are no longer
with us.
They are gone.
Great trees which should be here
so much longer than say,
you or I -
old trees watching over our great grandchildren
still murmuring in thin air
the ancient door keepers waving us home.
Now we stop on the road side
and absorb the loss of
entire mountains dead
over the spring, the summer
and Autumn
the gut-wrenching view lasting too long.
It is not like we could now
only just notice this
and be surprised.
Dead trees.
Please join us at One Single Impression.
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Christine, you have hit a nerve here. I hate to see the trees go too, especially the few native ones still left.
What is killing those trees? We have pine bark beatle infestations here in East Texas. The beatles didn’t get our trees but tree rustlers did, they cut seven big pines for timber.
..
It’s such a disaster to see this happen. Terrible.
here they mine the hills. that means they take whole mountaintops and blast them away simply to reach the coal below their skin. it’s sad really. i know this isn’t the same kind of death you speak of here but it’s a death nonetheless. i’ve also watched them cut mountains down to make a roadway. it breaks my heart to see such turmoil.
..
like the wood on a violin wails ..
whenever u write of trees _ u write with such fondness..
thank u for writing this ..
I have also seen this many times before up on the Smokey Mountains. Beautiful trees laid victim to the results of pollution.
Your writing painfully captures our loss.
Dearest Christine–
I too grieve over the beetle-kill pines here in Central Oregon.
And then there’s the brozne borer beetle that’s killing all the birch trees here in Central Oregon.
And some kind of blight that’s killing huge swaths of aspen in parts of Colorado.
What’s always so difficult for me is to remember that some of these diseases/blights are natural functions, and the way nature works. But then there’s the warming trends and other probable man-made changes that logically have to be having an impact.
This is beautifully done, and opened my heart yet again to our Brother Trees’ plight…
Same here. The northeast gets whatever is in the jet stream. That photo is down right scary.
Yet we do. I wonder what that’s about. How do we disassociate ourselves from the damage we do?
Christine, I knew what your poem alluded to almost immediately. It’s also a great sadness here in CO, where 95% of our lodge poles are estimated to die in the next few years. Our once flourishing green mountains are now covered with beetle-kill.
My heart was pounding before I saw the photo. Frightening.
Our human viewing window of this huge cycle of devastation and regrowth is so small, that we can only feel the heartache at losing sight of such a majestic forest. But I believe it will return, perhaps not the same species, but in some distant future, it will all be healed.
There are several hills near here that are facing this. By the same token, several other hills which burned a few years ago are now exhibiting a vast fresh forest, albeit only 3-4 feet tall, but they offer a little hope to those of us who dislike watching the death of green.
Your poem is eloquently full of compassion and love of nature.
Lovely poem yet full of sadness. Yes nature should last longer then we. Alas mankind cannot see,hear of feel.
love, Melanie
Christine, how sad! Is this from the beetle invasion? Your poem captures the sadness and the loss. I wonder if they will ever recover or return.
Heartbreaking! A poignant plea for restoring balance. So timely with Copenhagen less than a month away.