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