They chopped it down.
Moving through
That land between two rivers
In stampedes
Of angry growling machines
-Hell bent on profitable purpose
And a desire to burn
Those soft
Green
blanketed hills
Turning the dirt over,
Into the kind of green
-which burned inside their pockets
To them it was just a tree-
A 100 year old oak,
Firmly planted,
In a 20 acre spread
Bought and paid for
-by Progress and Improvement
Nothing but bark and limb
A simple seed
Which grew up
Watching the children of rootless immigrants
And exiled natives
Searching for solace and that unfamiliar territory:
Home
Simple branches stretching out
Over years
Offering peaceful shade to a community built
From the ground up
in that ground now deemed:
Eminent domain.
That oak watched as
New roads wove around it
Making way for
Very necessary government campgrounds
Filled with carbon copied concrete
Picnic tables, cold and hard
-So weatherproof it hurts.
And when the sad attempt
at a profitable preservation
Failed
The powers that be
Begrudging and blinded
Looked to the very ground
Which to them bled envy
And they ripped into it
Like starving scavengers
Unsatisfied with their leftovers
Now curious of the hunt,
so they chopped it down.
The whole damn thing.
Gobbled it up like a growing
Growling beast,
Who runs back to the corner
like a reprimanded dog
Just waiting
for the backsides of those
Who still stand for the things
no longer standing at all.
A Hermitess 