This crazy world is almost over
And I never got the chance to plant a tree.
A tree the way that trees used to be.
We live in them now since the plague—
Or rather, we live in what used to be their trunks.
From a distance now a forest looks like
The earth is growing hair—but sickly.
Giant follicles that point up but don’t sprout.
No foliage in the Fall—as the seasons now are one.
The earth’s axis makes no difference,
And the climate’s locked in orbit.
We won’t last long, but we won’t die soon.
The trunks of the biggest have room
For two. Not that there are many twos
Like the old twos, or Adam and Eve.
No, now we are twos of happenstance—
Whoever survived, whoever still can walk.
Whoever can sleep inside a hollow stalk
Of wood that’s changed to something smooth
And dead—but at least not poison to the touch.
The trees are more than shelters.
They also serve as tracks across the
Acid ground. We lay the thinner trunks like tiles
Across the sea of solvent.
A sea, but there’s no water,
Just the porous mattes that eat their way
Through everything you wear.
We carry them with us, the trunks,
Our homes and platforms.
The trunks are our lifeboats as we
Crawl like snails across the earth
Scavenging for food and fellow orphans
To wait with us as the final curtain falls,
This slow dying off. And not even fossils
Will remain as signs of our departing.
We’re selected out. Just erased.
At night when we sleep, it’s hard not to feel
The wooden walls as coffins.
This poem also appears in the May 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 5, page 8). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
