Tree Rant

Earth-shaker, air-, soil-, people-mover

attack the great pines of Vancouver...

No. This is not going to be a Nashery

because Nasheries are fun and funny.

This topic is neither. This is going to be a rant

about the reckless sense of entitlement 

of those who forget that you can't

replace some things. Not ever. And you will

be sorry when those things are gone.

A rant should sound like a rant. Blank verse, then.

Today on the way to the city I passed a hill

being eroded into a big flat gravel pit.

Tractors and bulldozers were crawling on it

like maggots in roadkill, and I wanted a super possum

to mop up those maggots. Sin of mental murder.

The Bible says we can say unto a mountain,

"Be thou removed," but I pity the fools who want to.

What I always want to say to mountains

is "Be thou where God has placed thee, 

blessed Protector and Grandmother. Be thou in peace

and impart that peace to our stupid mortal minds." 

Some say, "It takes all kinds..."

I say, "There is enough flat land on this Earth.

Let those who want more flat land go to Kansas."

There is enough treeless land on this Earth.

There are enough oil wells. I remember Sarah Palin.

She spoke for her people. I didn't like what they said.

I know I have no real right to like 

or dislike what they said. I still dislike

what they said. I did not dislike the woman

who told us what her people had to say.

So many years, so much talk, so many women

have made our own real choices in our lives 

and still they say "choice" when they mean abortion

and "She's impossible to work with!" when 

they mean "I can't keep up with her." Bah, humbug.

When people can run twenty circles around you

before breakfast, you learn from working for them.

I thought I could have worked for Sarah Palin

but it would have been a tough and tiring job. 

If those who hissed and spat about her choices

thought I heard anything but envy from them,

they were mistaken. Very much mistaken.

I don't like those who hated Sarah Palin

but said no word about the honest voices

of those who truly wanted to lay waste 

their biggest natural assets. Is that possible?

I used to doubt the town called Appalachia

really existed. Well, it does. I went there

with native guides, brave, tough older people.

The devastation brought tears to their eyes.

"A virgin wood, trees of fantastic size

are two miles up that path, if you can walk it."

My own elder didn't even try to talk it

but let me climb with an ex-cop, a fire fighter,

and a modern and enlightened logger.

Three men, one woman, failed to span one hemlock.

One said, "There was mad talk of logging here once.

Now that you've seen this place, you who'll outlive me,

if ever you hear such talk, you promise now

you'll join the human chain around these hemlocks."

I did. I don't understand how anyone didn't.

Thirty years before, I rode up to Vancouver.

My parents wanted us to See America 

By Bus, though all three of us had chickenpox

and nobody saw much of anything

but our own whines and itches. But I remember

the monstrous conifers, redwoods, sequoias,

and the great pines that stood beneath their feet

like foothills around mountains, windswept, ragged,

towering in their strength; not unlike those hemlocks.

The pines are nothing to compare with redwoods

but bigger, stronger than any pine Back East.

How people say anything to them but "Peace,

Tall Ones, and blessed be: long may you stand

where God has put you"? I don't want to know.

It's not as if there were a shortage of cheap wood.

They say Vancouver is stripping off their great pines

though sickly little pines are so abundant,

so easily reared to Christmas trees or pulp wood.

They say Brazil is burning their great rain forests.

They say Alaska wants to drill their parklands.

I believe it, because here in my own town

the maggots are gnawing into the side of our mountain.

The maggot-souls are poisoning human beings

because they're too lazy to pour boiling water

on native plants, and cultivating kudzu.

God, what is man, and how do You endure us?

And for how long now? I don't want to know.

"Do you Greens prefer trees to people?" 

Say: "Which people?"

I prefer almost anything, possums, poison ivy,

real honest maggots who dispose of garbage,

to people who pollute and destroy land;

yet it's for people that land's worth preserving,

real human people who on sight love mountains

and beaches, rocks and trees and butterflies,

who ought always to inherit all of the Earth

but we don't see that happening, somehow.