our wounded land

 

reading the woods

in my lifetime I have watched the woods change:

slowly, inexorably, profoundly,

fifteen years before I was born,

the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was dedicated,

mostly our national policy toward its parks has been hands-off

to this large expanse of mountains and valleys:

a minimum of roads, of parking areas, of trails,

mostly following the rule

that the less human action allowed, the better,

sins of commission so much worse than omission,

our land butts up against the national park on two sides,

as a child I played in the pine forest

which came after the farms and orchards were abandoned,

a few apple trees survived at the edges,

while great beech trees survived all the domestication of the land

since their lumber wasn't prized,

tulip poplar trees, and their cousins, were prized

and their seeds found purchase on the newly-"free" land

they reached up as high as they could,

their hunger for sun mostly starved out the pines

of my childhood, brambles clearing in the understory,

in the largeness of the park, in a few areas, 

small patches of old growth forest

somehow escaped humanity's hunger for more and more,

I knew one huge tulip poplar tree, high up a hollow,

that was over 22 feet in circumference,

five feet above the half-angle ground where it rooted,

below it next generation buckeye also remembered

the old forest in who they were:

giants, with bark like rippled sand,

with a glory of wildflowers below them every spring,

anywhere enough land was spared the saw,

a community re-built itself

with connections and relationships

that got our awe, but not our understanding,

the roots below our feet pull us back to early beginnings,

we humans blundered into Eden when we were as children,

and we knew not what we did,

except that we could spend the Earth's savings willy-nilly

on whatever necessity or bauble attracted us,

we have been, and still are, Mickey in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice,"

stumbling into powers we do not understand and cannot control,

even this national park is not immune from our excesses:

air pollution, climate change,

plagues of non-native insects, blights, plants,

 ravage this world which is working hard to remember

who it was, who it is, who it can be,

I remember our first born child,

he could readily knock down towers of blocks,

but it took him three months more to learn to stack the blocks,

I hope we have that needed metaphorical "three months"

before far too much is lost.

by Henry H. Walker

October 17, ‘26