Prevention

Birds cry aloud in the pre-spring air as the trees are chopped down 

The forest seems half what it was

the logs stack in great heaps

weep great tears of sap 

their trunks bearing the pattern of the gnawing beetles

 So it is with reason they are felled

Whereby foresters mean to prevent the loss of the whole forest

It seems no less a tragedy 

The chainsaw sounds a menace

The birds are slowly flocking back from the south

 startle in unfamiliar woods

murmuring about the fields 

as the tractors come out to plow freshly thawed ground

It’s just nature some would say 

Come fire and flood purging

Renewing the Earth again by way of destruction 

Now it is the bugs that have come

And humans by way of intervening 

Come to chop down trees

To slow the spread…

Rushing around putting out fires 

Never desiring nature to take its course 

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