A Plea in a Foreign Tongue - Barry Vesser

[Larry Robinson]

A Plea in a Foreign Tongue
 
The Spanish moss streaming off
the branches of a hillside of black oaks
like olive sheets of rain,
a wailing of ancestral grief
brings real tears to my eyes.
They have seen and felt so much, these trees.
Through their roots:
They have felt how we have thinned
and poisoned the soil; 
how our anger and greed for power
has scorched the earth with the flame of drought.
Through the tips of their branches:
How we have sullied the air
with the smoke of delusion.  
They grieve for the loss of the great trees,
the grizzly, the herds of elk,
the thick flocks of birds,
who lived and worshipped in their branches,
and for the people who knew their place,
and did not set themselves
apart from nature.
Who loved the land
as they loved themselves.
 
There is not much time they seem to say.
They are not afraid, but they mourn.
Perhaps we only have weeks to learn
their language, so ancient and
undecipherable to us.
We cannot go back you say.
But we cannot go forward without
reimagining who we are.

	- Barry Vesser