Ellen Mass

Sleep fails as my brain begs the blade to stop, but continues deafening into my heartwood, slicing into the cortex winter coat that protected me from freeze and disease, but mercilessly cuts through the Cambrian layers of old age and evolution that healed all wounds and carried water nutrients to your crowns.

The kill saw severs my blood veins with no escape from monsters of greed The sapwood system has steadfastly run through the vascular circuitry and life flow, with your oxygen system for breath of all living things; transporting leaf nutrients from finger limbs to roots which mother sun provides. Grateful for too much carbon the sapwood sequesters into the earth.

The grinding saw penetrates the Ploem neath a protective green layer, shield for silver maples from disease to fuel the entire vascular system with the sugar food we trees need,

Your miracle sap layer - strong in health and heartwood, stood you upright for a 100 years, You, our kin watching over farms, animals, making bird homes, all creatures o the earth thrive on your rich provisions. long roots to stem erosion, flood waters--, and great carbon earth symbiosis to flow through the soils as tiny hairs uptake your needs, to travel far to your crown in the perfection of leaves and sequester to help us breath clean.

Slowly and torturously the killer revs his machcine and severs your heartwood pith center of rich resin. Wretching and shaking our kin are felled and roots ripped away and ground into the earth with monster machine. You fell in great numbers that fall day, never suspecting anything wrong. Tree language, you told us always, is one of harmony and community --beyond which you would not go. You martyr yourself for us.

We carry no weapons now in our fair city to hold back the flood of greed which greets us everywhere without your countenance.

Today at Solstice, at the beginning of more light - to you, our silver maples, we give great homage for the bountiful gifts, and cry shame for your passing. Our Alewife silver maple forest will live in us.

This poem was written by me after 10 years of giving value and purpose to the Alewife silver maple forest, but it was not enough to save the woodlands and to combat the powers of greed and corruption which exist. We must continue to do try again and again.