stonepicnicking_okapi

November 8, 2016 was a hard day for me. I woke up to the news of Trump's election and to the fact that every single tree around my apartment had been removed. The sound of the chainsaw and the election are inextricably linked and it was just a traumatic sort of awakening to how much greed and hate and stupidity there was in the world and how it would very much hurt me even if I was blind to it and I was ashamed of my blindness. And it was the beginning of me going 'no contact' with most of my family (Trump supporters) so this poem is a terza rima about the missing trees for the Fandom Empire challenge prompt trees + fairy tale/fantasy

I wish there were Ents by okapi

bright morning-after woke treeless and bare.
loud nightmare buzzing of the day before
had stripped them all. all I could do was stare

and think of Ents, those trees of Tolken lore.
they would have fought loud saws, greed’s broad assault,
and laid low machine and man as they tore

away everything. full scourge left a fault
and a wasteland. like an old fairytale,
the kind gathering dust in a vault,

‘happily ever after’s ever fail
to manifest. raw, blank bleakness without
matches despair within. dawning shames nail

the coffin on what used to be. they rout
the weed of ignorant blindness grown hale
while trees stood, like Ents, never once in doubt