by James Brush
Tag: trees
live oak branches
nighttime beetles hover
among shadowed leaves
Great Treaty Oak, a poisoned husk,
bent boughs beneath this ashen dusk.
The deals we reached beneath this tree
portended its pale and broken dusk.
I always dreamed I’d shoot your scenes
beneath theses branches at golden dusk.
Long years and days withered away
and swallowed you in barren dusk.
Odd limbs still live and mingle with
new high rise lines in token dusk.
Somehow you found the way back home
all through the long moth-eaten dusk.
And the songs of city birds suggest
the dawn of some new-woven dusk.
—
This is for Joseph Harker’s Reverie 14: Ghazal Boot Camp using some of the words from Wordle 51 at The Sunday Whirl.
Note for non-Austinites: Treaty Oak is a 500-year-old southern live oak in downtown Austin. In 1989 some jackass poisoned it. After a major recovery effort, it survived and said jackass went to jail for a good long time. It’s still a big tree but only a fraction of its former self, yet ten years later it started releasing acorns again.
dry live oak flowers
a withered rain following
each southerly gust
These photos were taken last week at Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County, California, a short drive north of San Francisco. Muir Woods is part of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. You can click on the images to enlarge and view at a higher resolution.
Muir Woods is an old growth redwood forest. It feels like a church or a library or a little bit of both. At least until the tour buses arrive.
The coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is the tallest and among the oldest of living things.
The tallest trees at Muir come to around 250 feet, and the oldest ones are around 1200 years old.
The tallest and oldest trees at Muir Woods are relatively short and young for coastal redwoods which used to cover two million acres of coastal California and Oregon.
Most of that is gone now.
