Clothed in its blanket of birds
Great arms reaching impossibly high
Her leaves filtering the light between shadows
And flashing diamonds of sky
For thousands of travels round the sun
She worshipped the turning earth
Through raging fires, the shaking ground, frozen winters
Droughts for decades burned the soils,
The rivers disappeared and still she held herself
High and strong
Even the humans recognized her power
Leaving offerings around her roots
Fruits of the earth, fish and painted stones

And then George came
The natives told him it was the largest tree in the world
The Mother Tree
He needed to monetize it
No one was going to come out to see it
And he needed capital for investments (mostly *****)
So he cut her bark off
Just the first 20 feet or so
Carried it off and put it on a train
For paying customers to see (two feet thick and 20’ high, oh my!)
They say she lived for another year or two before she died
They drove iron spikes into the trunk so visitors could climb up her skeleton
And over a century later, over a hundred feet of her trunk
Still rises over the valley of the giant trees

I like to think that the Mother,
That burned spar on the hill
Is still trying to protect us
From ourselves.
Selah
2015