Poems by Marda Messick

Bristlecone

by Marda Messick

From Canary Fall 2023

Marda lives on richly bio-diverse land that is the ancestral territory of the Apalachee Nation.

A forester, a woman in her twenties,
hair pulled back, a good shot,
or someone like that

who breathes easily at the altitude
of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
where, she knows where

still lives the Methuselah Tree
four thousand eight hundred and four years old,
location in the grove undisclosed

because who doesn’t want to stand
before the oldest life on earth
and take just one needle and a selfie

so in the dusk of a day with weather
coming in fast along the ridge,
she walks the trail in the stripping wind

and stops where she’ll never tell
and removes her boots to stand
beyond the roots on holy ground

before Methuselah,
a park ranger with a badge and a vow,
a priest of the trees of the world.

© Marda Messick

Planetary Defense
Double Asteroid Redirection Test

by Marda Messick

From Canary Fall 2023

All the giant telescopes of the earthlings
point seven million miles counting down the last seconds
of fourteen thousand per hour
ten months and
three hundred thirty million dollars

the cost to toss a dart in a long shot arc
like a snowball
flung by a strong bully boy
to hit an asteroidal moonlet
now trailing a tail
six thousand miles long

so when in future a space-time offender
helter skelters toward the earth
like a movie of apocalypse

or that day in the Paleogene
when Tyrannosaurus looked up
for one last instant
before extinction

we have the skill to knock it
with a pool shark shot
into an orbital pocket
and save the world
if by then there is a world

any heroes to do the math
or dancers for the victory dance

© Marda Messick