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Description
Glorious she was in her day
Beautiful and healthy, with thick mossy skin,
Lush curves and wooded limbs with which she set to sway and dance.
So often I would play and dance beneath the skirts of her dark canopy
Playing games, adventuring, exploring and honing woodsy skills.
To spot the bear tracks, find the rare red trillium.
So easy to take for granted something so beautiful and eternal,
When it seems like it shall be there forever.

I remember the day the bulldozer came
And returning that spring to the massacre of trees,
Their bodies pushed and piled,
Cut up and carried away.
A demolished village, once a home
Open and welcoming to any deer, raccoon or rabbit,
Now coarse and desolate, open to the elements.
I walked amongst the bulldozed roots, trees and stumps
and cried at the loss of the place I held so dear.

And yet it was not over,
For they dug out the body, gouging the flesh
Leaving mires, welts to fill with swampy pus
A birthing ground for gangrenous mosquitoes.

I paid my respects to that rock face I once climbed and slid upon,
and that great and majestic child of the ice age,
the boulder which sat and offered her smooth weathered back
To us children to sit atop for games, picnics and reading.
Shaded and concealed by the hemlocks evergreen skirts.
Later that spring I came to find those immortal, timeless bodies,
Bombed to pieces with dynamite.

And then the machines came to stitch up her wound,
Mar it forever with a driveway.
Built up with huge chunks of granite,
The heads and ears and noses of other old cliffs
Piled high up to form a long, ugly scar,
Running down along her landscape.

Slowly like a growing tumour
The walls arose out of the wound.
Concrete and drywall, nails and glass,
Expanding, rising and taking hideous shape.
The mourning of the birds drowned out
By the hungry teeth of drills and saws.

They left her a sutured Frankenstein
For her new keepers now to care for and dispose of as they pleased.
A battered whore, they painted her face
With cheap makeup of grass and flowers,
Tawdry jewellery made of gaudy garden ornaments and lawn chairs.

They wanted to use her year round;
A home to hang their heart in,
Transplanting it within her mutilated flesh.
Completing her transformation,
They chopped off the gorgeous bracken locks.
Sheering off the juniper and aspen that coloured her hairline,
Burning it uselessly to make space,
Leaving her crown to be eroded by the insatiable shore.

Helpless I watched and wept,
Unable to stop the devastation
Trying hard to cling to the memory of her lost landscape.

All this for those who longed to have
A peaceful cottage set in nature.

Description
Glorious she was in her day
Beautiful and healthy, with thick mossy skin,
Lush curves and wooded limbs with which she set to sway and dance.
So often I would play and dance beneath the skirts of her dark canopy
Playing games, adventuring, exploring and honing woodsy skills.
To spot the bear tracks, find the rare red trillium.
So easy to take for granted something so beautiful and eternal,
When it seems like it shall be there forever.

I remember the day the bulldozer came
And returning that spring to the massacre of trees,
Their bodies pushed and piled,
Cut up and carried away.
A demolished village, once a home
Open and welcoming to any deer, raccoon or rabbit,
Now coarse and desolate, open to the elements.
I walked amongst the bulldozed roots, trees and stumps
and cried at the loss of the place I held so dear.

And yet it was not over,
For they dug out the body, gouging the flesh
Leaving mires, welts to fill with swampy pus
A birthing ground for gangrenous mosquitoes.

I paid my respects to that rock face I once climbed and slid upon,
and that great and majestic child of the ice age,
the boulder which sat and offered her smooth weathered back
To us children to sit atop for games, picnics and reading.
Shaded and concealed by the hemlocks evergreen skirts.
Later that spring I came to find those immortal, timeless bodies,
Bombed to pieces with dynamite.

And then the machines came to stitch up her wound,
Mar it forever with a driveway.
Built up with huge chunks of granite,
The heads and ears and noses of other old cliffs
Piled high up to form a long, ugly scar,
Running down along her landscape.

Slowly like a growing tumour
The walls arose out of the wound.
Concrete and drywall, nails and glass,
Expanding, rising and taking hideous shape.
The mourning of the birds drowned out
By the hungry teeth of drills and saws.

They left her a sutured Frankenstein
For her new keepers now to care for and dispose of as they pleased.
A battered whore, they painted her face
With cheap makeup of grass and flowers,
Tawdry jewellery made of gaudy garden ornaments and lawn chairs.

They wanted to use her year round;
A home to hang their heart in,
Transplanting it within her mutilated flesh.
Completing her transformation,
They chopped off the gorgeous bracken locks.
Sheering off the juniper and aspen that coloured her hairline,
Burning it uselessly to make space,
Leaving her crown to be eroded by the insatiable shore.

Helpless I watched and wept,
Unable to stop the devastation
Trying hard to cling to the memory of her lost landscape.

All this for those who longed to have
A peaceful cottage set in nature.