Boscobel Lands Clearcut Devastation - Poems and Picture

Unclear Cut

It is not clear,
can not be clear,
in our single-minded minds,
what the cut does.

On the surface
clear sounds better
than cloudy
better than murky
better than obstruction
“there was something
in our way”

The man looks
out his new window
across the newness of
the single-minded lawn
saying
“we couldn’t see the
ridge over there,
but now we do”

in a language
the birds who
flew through
the dense of the forest
didn’t speak

nor the deer
who could dream at night
beneath the fullness
of the dreaming trees.

 

 

Edith Hope Estate Lands, March 19, 2012

by Roger Davies

In the Civil War photographs of amputations,
the arms legs feet hands
of soldiers are intertwined haphazard,
tossed to the place of useless,
to the thick and bloodied stack.
Whatever the ways of life they were
now no longer rise.  What rises and rises
is brute marker to the brutishness of it all.
The ghastly mound grows, to bury a better time
which found measure in the sound of feet
at joyful dance, his hand around her waist --
a warm time measured by the breezes
rising and falling through Hemlocks' noble branches,
through the opening needles delicious to the wind.

 

 

 

 

The Occupiers at the Hope Estate Lands

The Hemlocks were occupiers.
They just blew in with the wind.

They set up their canopies
of overhanging branches,
fed themselves in a tree
sort of way, and others too
who came around
on wing, or four legs.

They didn’t seem to mind
staying out in the wind,
or rain, or intense heat of day.
They seemed to like it,
sprouting a community
out of whatever was around,
and endured.

They were active life.
You could sit with them
and know that.

Their days were numbered
by deeds and contracts
and laws and lack of laws,
and by the people in neckties
who ordered the little yellow banners
of death and destruction.

They weren’t part of the planning process
and attended no meetings for community
input, if there had been any.

The machines moved in, growled,
cleared them out, when no one was looking.

Someone came later
and said there would be respectable
New England homes, straight out
of the catalogue, the best money
could buy.  

The occupiers were untidy
and only had themselves.
If their pictures were in a catalogue
it was pretend.

The timeline did not tolerate them.

Each one was unique,
well rooted.  Each one
was born, lived, died.

The planners waited
in their office, waiting to plan.
The taxman got fidgety.
The capitalist, who only saw
accumulating underbrush,
knew what to do.