Adam Elgar
The Future of Wood
The people dream only of trees. Leaves’ games
with light and the rigour of bark fill their nights
now that the forests have been felled.
In sleep their artisans know all the possible,
and most impossible, ways to use a tree. The elders
shrug and say, “The trees would sympathise.
Our terrors are the same. We shudder
as they did at the recklessness of wind
and blades’ shrill intimacy.”
No one speaks openly about the trees’ own dreams,
though rumour hints that they were acted out
in crimson as a homage to our branched red flow.
Behind the hiss of twigs, the people’s nights
begin to rustle with the sound of knotted fingers
crafting human figures out of bone.
Adam Elgar’s poetry has appeared in Poetry Review and The Wolf, and in online journals including nthposition, Eclectica, Loch Raven Review, Snakeskin, and The Chimaera. His chapbook, Temporali, is available from Lopside Press.
Page(s) 52
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