A poem from our daily walk: this time the forest won

Annie and I walk most days up a gravel road through an area that used to be all coastal forest. It lies in the airport flight path and was once planned to be a large recreational complex with a golf course, houses and other buildings, but they were never built. Over the years, we have watched big machines rip out the trees and leave sections nearly bare, but the plants always grow back. The rabbits, deer, cougars and snakes return. However, a couple of the old bulldozers remain. I don’t understand this waste of machinery that just sits there and rots, but they are here, slowly falling apart as the forest reclaims its land. Today I share this picture and poem with you. 

Captured

Long ago the bulldozers came,

jaws ripping down the pines and Sitka spruce,

merciless tires smashing through

blackberry vines, cow parsnip and buttercups,

leaving a graveyard of sun-bleached trunks

among which the deer could find no food.

Now the hard-hat men work somewhere else,

but they left their big machine behind.

The grass has grown so thick only a rabbit

could run to the rusting steel hulk

to sniff at its cracking leather seat,

its gears, its knobs, a forgotten glove.

Scotch broom surrounds it like a fence,

seed pods rattling against the rails.

Thorny vines wrap around its rotting tires.

Crows perch on the top and shit

while a single purple foxglove plant

dances in front of the deadly jaws.