The alders are the reoccupiers
they come easily and quickly into skinned land
rising like an ambush on raked ridges
jabbing like whiskers
up through the washed-out
faces of neverused roads.
The alders are the forestfixers
bandaging brown wounds
with applegreen sashes
filling in for the fallen firs
jostling up by the stumps
of grandfather cedars
leaning slim to the wind
by the logjammed loggerleft streams.
The alders are the encroachers
seizing ground the greater trees owned
once
but no more.
It is time for the alders.
Like a bright upstart army
they crowd the deadwood spaces
reaching
at last for the hand of the whole
unshadowed sun.
From “Between The Sky and the Splinters,”Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys; Selected poems 1969-2004, p.33, Peter Trower. Harbour Publishing,
