Poems by Ellen Parent
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Succession
by Ellen Parent
From Canary Spring 2022
Ellen lives in the Northeast Kingdom, on a granite hill formed alongside the White Mountains during the Acadian Orogeny 100 million years ago. Her home is surrounded by tamaracks and sugar maples, chickadees and an Abenaki path now known as Route 2.
My bright memory of coyotes
slipping through damp milkweed
through high meadows
just twenty years ago--
gone.
Eighty white pines
fill the fields now.
Now roots plow the old soil.
In the beginning these hills burst naked
from the earth’s first churning,
cultivated postglacial coats
of spruce and pine,
of oak and pine--
Green exhalations breathed a thousand
thousand years--
But every tree fell
to sixty seasons of a log baron’s
boom and a two-man saw.
Now baron, blade-- they’re gone, too.
And me, passer-by, brief beating heart--
Do I mourn my lost light,
blown milkweed, coyote ghosts
chasing field mice down the valley?
Or do I bow to these shadows,
dark press of branches and dapple,
the wild that keeps coming back?
© Ellen Parent