Linking Past Neglect

It's a subtle shift I see in wood beneath my plane. Shades between years in times past, where summers came and went and left behind a year's life recorded in two tones of light and dark, of warmth and the rains that filled the rivers and the soil that bled into them and then into the ocean deeps.

A season comes, the girth increased and left an imprint of damaged years when growth sped faster and the forest canopy came down at the stroke of an ax and a hand-driven saw to preface the advent when men wore orange self protection to remove their prize all the faster with machines they held in two hands.

The canopy destroyed no longer shielded future growth in saplings on the forest floor. And there too the animals fled in dread of men who dropped their lofty platforms from which they once garnered modest ways of life.

A yearn echoing emptiness inside me, asked of me the reason why a man in greed cut down the more rather than the less to leave no inheritance for future generations. Those lost pockets of saneness where life unseen thrived to spread out harmlessly beneath a canopy that filtered harm and caused new growth to reach its arms up from the softness of the forest floor.

The scarred remains of greed and degradation remain as the rings of growth in a stem of wood tell truth of an untold beauty now long gone. The oceans deepen with our greed and consumers fear the future now told not by what once was living but is now gone but by what left its scar and the sad loss of yet another seemingly insignificant bird or beetle or fungi.

And now we waken from our slumber to face a future that tells a story in a single ring of truth that's laid layer on layer through a century and two of growth and we want to plug our ears with our fingers to the unspoken cries that the very trees cry out with from the poverty and destitution of the long-gone and now lost forest floor.

'We'll plant ten trees, no twenty more, for every one we cut!' the men with the ax and the saw say loudly, and all say, 'That's OK then." And there they stand in rows of neatness but then it's not the same for the canopy no longer reaches out its umbrellaed spread.

I wonder in the resurrection of life that might yet come whether we could see beyond ourselves a future yet unseen in the planing of trees not planned to destroy or desecrate or then violate or vandalise but one to cover the scarred earth once more in trees of green with outspread arms that touch their very fingertips to one another.