Ken Okuno

I wasn’t there when they came with saws
so now the tree that watched the land is gone.
I’ll count the rings to verify
the four great trunks witnessed a century or more,
a living being proving life will go on till it doesn’t,
and anyway no one died and no one suffered.
Everything is made of light after all.

Comes a ghost upwelling from earth
like love through rain before the artery is cut,
and the light coming through the midsummer canopy,
greenish and warm, and the light
of reddish leaves in fall, and the clear light
of winter through bare branches —
is dark this last spring of its life.

5/4/25

Altadena