David ‘Gypsy’ Chain, killed while protesting the clearcutting of Californian Redwoods, Humboldt County, September 1998
Too late to say it aloud, but what I love
are phantom birds and girls with parasols
in paintings that no one looks at any more, the breathless
quiet of pentimenti sealed in the pigment;
and every living thing that went extinct
before a man could name it, unknown
hummingbirds and tree frogs, fig-trees, orchids,
aeons of filmy fern gone down to coal, lost
redwoods veined with centuries of light
and the faint but indelible stain of a living man
who died because he trusted to the earth
the heart he had kept intact, though no one in these parts
speaks any longer of hearts, or the sound in the trees
that once was a spirit and now is no more than the wind.