HOME FROM WAR – a poem

This sonnet is in my last book, Guerrilla Country (published by Flight of the Dragonfly, 2024). It was also published in Shot Glass Journal in May 2023.

Home from war 

In landscapes where trees used to talk with trees
through filaments beneath leaf-littered ground,
the paths I knew no longer welcome me
and oaks that once cast shade, cast shadows now—

and conjure armed and anxious pickets, guarding
men with axes, heard but never seen:
their echoes turning forest into farms; 
their harvest forming dams across our streams.

War came here while I was away at war—
whole swathes reduced to bramble, briar and stumps
criss-crossed by giants felled as if by storms
while coppice stems stand bare in summer sun.

Though beech still talk with beech, in their own tongue,
they’re fearful—fewer, quieter than before.