Elegy for American Beeches
With beech leaf disease and beech bark disease on the landscape,
American beech is imperiled. —Penn State Extension
You wore a cloak of bears, turkeys, squirrels,
grouse, with a delicate beech-husk fringe.
Someone had carved a heart
on your smooth paper skin.
The scar had spread,
shadowy, like an old tattoo.
Whose signature do you carry?
Did they care that their initials were
an open wound? Is that why
you hold your leaves all winter?
Perhaps you are hiding spring buds from deer,
sheltering promises from a world that cannot be trusted.
Your tawny, ribbed leaves
are like small dry hands, clinging to summer.
Marcescence: holding withered leaves through winter.
A buffy splash of faith between cold trunks.
In the wind, a gentle rattle, not of death, yet,
but of a plan we don’t understand.
Are you holding snow in your arms to claim the water,
your leaf-stash to feed your roots one more time?
Now you will need it all. We’ve done more
than carve your skin this time: I see a plague
in your leaves, dark bands of death
amid the green, the light leaving you.
I see your cloak slipping to the ground,
your leaf-voice breathing danger to the wind.
Will we listen?
Will we ever stop carving our names on your body?
Sally Zaino’s poetry has appeared previously in Cider Press Review, Avocet, Flycatcher, Snowy Egret, Watershed, Poetry Takes Wings (editor’s choice), Humana Obscura, EcoTheo Review, and others. Read more.