SALVAGE THIS
This poem needs to be
saved from itself.
It is way over the hill.
Words on dead wood.
Long ago it
ceased to be profitable.
You would be
keeping it
from being taken
by its own
dark and useless powers.
There are words in here
over a thousand years old.
They have conspired
with other creatures
and been spoken
with air
that has been inside
the leaves of trees.
These words
when spoken
are an ancient forest.
Some of the words
they say
are no longer productive.
Truth. Love.
Compassion for all beings.
Hey--
call the operators.
Haul them away to the mill.
But say--
isn't that a trace of
human wisdom
in among those words?
And down there isn't that a
vole digging for buried
meaning in the
decay and duff of a
culture that long ago
knew how to say, Enough--
don't be taking
what you haven't created
and can't pay back.
There is blood here.
An owl is eating the vole.
There is life here.
These words are
inside the trees again.
What happens
to our words
happens to the forest.
What happens to the forest
happens
to us.
We should be cutting
lies instead of trees.
— Jerry Martien
By cutting to the truth of our experience, poetry shakes us and awakens us. Through it we open our eyes
to what Robert Frost called
“the pleasure of taking pains.”
Uni-verse
