after the storm
in the forest
there is carnage everywhere
limbs strewn violently across
fresh beds of moss.
arbutus, heliotropic
reach towards the sun,
outstretched like dancing limbs
for the kiss of sky’s azure
until that same wind that gently spun them
into spirals
shows it’s unleashed fullness
roaring through, tears branch from trunk
and tosses it with a deadening crack onto a bed of salal.
whole massive firs topple
from cliffsides down to the sea
drowned spires that were once crowns
are garlanded with seaweed and everywhere,
flung sticks knocked off their steady skyward climb
come clattering down among the stones,
grave, greying, gone.
life goes on
in undaunted profusion :
with one half torn asunder a big leaf maple
grows double thick
the repair job raising up a wide whorling burl
while the cedar bark, drenched in cauterizing sap,
patches a hole left where once
was a graceful arching bough.
though we do grow deeper roots,
heal parts of us have been shorn away through violence,
upheaval, or careful amputation —
our paths are littered with debris.
our skirts hang down to cover the scars
and yet : we elegize our pain in song,
in story, in lines like these
If we had to go on living with our dead all around us
maybe we too would have the audacity
to wear berries in our hair like the ruby skinned arbutus
if our scars and our suffering was written on our bodies
the way the scorched bark of a lightning struck yew tells it
we wouldn’t need stories :
wouldn’t need to carve our initials into bark
Songs, then
are like sheaves gathered up after a tempest —
the shedding of lives within our larger life
writ on curled parchments,
like birch scrolls that tell of an earlier self,
the tender sapling that is destined to be
wind whipped
stripped bare
and calloused over
by the rampant ride of time.