A Particular Sadness

Here is a poem I have been working on for some time.  It comes from the event of a tall pine tree--some three stories tall--falling near my home.  I went out for a bit, its familiarity subconsciously comforting me, and upon returning home a short time later, I was forced to walk past its fallen form.  I did become sad for that particular loss--the smell of sawdust soon replacing the tree's presence.  But since then it has became a symbol of the all the accrued losses, consequences of greed through our unnecessary national economic crisis, over the last number of years.  Wrestling with the iconic American Dream, I continue writing this poem.

A Particular Sadness

A new gap in the earth

The smell of wet soil, pungent and heavy.

A titan of a tree gave in to the wind

Gave in to the wind

And fell.

We were knee deep

In severed pine, shoulder deep

In lateral, aching branches

Losing purpose

And life.

Soil, unaccustomed to light

Breathed out its breath, gasping for darkness

Evaporating its clammy heart,

Its very heart,

Into air.

Nine birds—refugees now—

Perched in sparse, leafless, neighbor trees

Like Darfurian refugees spread out on the sand,

Spread out on the sand.

They lost their homes.

They lost their homes!

A new space was born.

An empty space was birthed by titan’s absence.

A new space was violently made

At the cost of that tree.

Oh, that beautiful tree!

And I—I gained a particular sadness.

Copyright M.R. Hyde 2012