one day hiking up Beech Hill, i saw that I was walking through not a lush, fertile forest, but a ruin, an archeology of hurt, and saw that part of that hurt was in my own inability to notice the damage done, to mourn the greater loss I could barely see
Life in rows along Eroded rock walls whispers Of recent farms, recent By tree life, not ours. Stray sentinels uncut by Relentless plowing, they hold Memory of their own losses A howling of lonely roots Some humans hear only in their blood, if at all Those humans were land Hungry, indentured generations Finally free on new land No time to discern the beech, chestnut and blueberry And those who tended A wild abundance with gentler hands and hearts. Old world roots of pain and loss and desire drove deep into the rock and resurfaced on new land. New walls rose from split earth Potatoes and corn ached toward the sun Strange new life in rows. Now, we tramp amidst the crooked stone walls, feeling for our own Lost roots, aching down through thin Soil into the whispering Rock, trying to find the way back home.