Revisionist Poetry – “Elegy” – Deep Roots, v.2

They came with orange teeth and iron mouths,
surveyors laughing in bright vests, chainsaws like hymns.
Wood fell in slow, appalling arcs—husks breaking,
old trunks toppling like small cathedrals collapsing.
Sap ran red along the cuts, a ribbon of stolen blood;
sawdust snowed the yards, white as a sudden cemetery.

Where giants stood, there are stumps—circles of exposed grief—
and in the hollows the clay keeps the echo of an axe.
The air smells of diesel and of something older, grieved.
Children come as if to the scene of a death.
They kneel, palms pressed to root-mouths, listening.
Their games become quiet rites: they name the lost—Elm, Alder, Hemlock—
saying and re-saying names like rosaries.

They dig with spoons and sticks, not for treasure but for answers,
prying at the dark knots that once tethered trunks to earth.
A hollow is a throat; moss is a tongue that answers in damp breath.
They call the tunnels—Coal-Mine, Heart-Passage, Under-Home—
and move through them as if through a church aisle, their feet whispering.
Laughter comes thin, like wind through bone, and sometimes stops—listening.

Sometimes a child puts an ear to a root and blames the tremble
on trains or on the town; sometimes she swears she hears voices—
old names threaded like buried cables, the slow geography of what was.
We who felled them call it progress; the children call it treaty.
They leave small altars of stones and paper boats on the stumps,
and when the sun goes down their play becomes a vigil.

At dusk the ruined wood is a map of small sacraments—
and the roots, knotted and dark, hold the long slow weight of remembering.