Crouching slick faced in the depths of the pines,
Drums are echoing in me like dead men.
The forest always knows how it will end,
The thick autumn painted crimson with blood.
The deer murmurs as I slowly take sight
And ran for miles after his mortal wound.
Through ravines and thorns I carefully wound:
His corpse was still beating among the pines.
Cone-needle bed is his funeral site.
Death has become the tooth-scarce grin of men.
My hands are on the shoulders of my blood:
A burden he must carry through the end.
Not long after this the deer filled the end
Of our truck and the ragged red-brown wound
Pained my eyes, hissing at me as the blood
Fled from it like a warrior who pines
For home. We cut him apart with old men
And the winter made our breath turn to sight.
Two months later my kin’s ribs are the sight
That tell me it is all about to end.
Where once stood muscle now lay paper men
Leaking memories, ready to be wound
In the splint’ring rigidity of pine
And finally make good their debt of blood
We are starving without the nature-blood
And the black smoke pollutes the holy site
Where killing became living in the pines.
Now there are machines living at the end
Of my fence, chewing on the trees, wounding
My mother with the oiled claws of un-men.
I meandered slowly towards the dead men
Now laid enshrouded deep within the blood
Of the forest. I am the living wound
Among the trees. Wooden markers show sights
Of a generation shortly ended.
There is no life among the wretched pines.
Now coming are the haunted men who pine
for the forest of their blood, but the end
has come and earth-wounds are their only sight.