The Wilderness Lives

The wilderness lives.
That is our secret.
It lives long after

the rape and pillaging of strangers
disguised as allies and lovers,
even those with best intentions
to go with their closed minds.

It lives on
even when with time flowers, and trees grow
and the rubble underneath becomes garden,
albeit
with a thin veneer of soil, of new earth,
never quite deep enough
that you can cease to worry
whether it will survive the inevitable storms,
and leave flowers
or rubble.

About this poem

Trauma leaves scars. Some are cleverly covered up.

Almost.

The picture was taken in the abandoned slate quarry across from my house in Vermont. Depending on who you talk to around here, it was abandoned in the late fifties or early sixties.

Tom