City of Trees

The knives of youth scratch into your bark, O city of trees, their emblems for eternal love, and in a graveyard, your ground is dotted with the dregs of piss and puke; may deeper still reach your unpoisoned roots.

They find no reason not to call you home, those twitching birds, those scurrying squirrels, that the city still has left. While on whatever breeze, your branches still bend just enough - whether north or south or east or west - as about you human lives break human lives, over much much less. A religion that breathes only light and air: Your leaves attract no quarrel, no calamity, as they whisper ancient, rustling prayers. And in the city of excited light, of relentless sirens and tourist sights - Oak, Ash, Beech, Willow; your quiet names speak nothings to you.

Your tiny points of green dot a patchwork of grey, it's true: From thirty-five thousand feet you look like nothing much, hardly a city at all. With the gridded roads and groping scrapers, so tiny and so tall, under the in-flight and metal wings, there you race away. Indescribable things; in the dappling of your summer light, let a man sense something of a man's true height.