The Forest is not Finished

 The Forest Is Not Finished

 

Where is Congress?

Beneath the white dome,

the machinery still turns.

Votes are cast. The record grows.

On paper, the tree is alive.

But outside, people are calling through the branches:

Where are you?

Trust did not disappear overnight.

It left like water—

a little through the cracked earth,

a little beneath the door, a little each time the storm came

and someone insisted the roof was holding.

Vietnam. Watergate. Wars. Crashes.

Promises made beneath bright lights

and broken in rooms we could not see.

Leaf by leaf,

the canopy thinned.

And still we ask:

Are we watched?

The answer is more complicated than fear.

There are laws, courts, warrants, limits.

Some powers have ended.

Others are winding down. A sunset written into law
does not make the room dark at once.

And freedom—

freedom is not the flag alone.

It is whether the person beneath it
can speak, worship, vote,
and expect justice to recognize them.

America is still called free.

But freedom can remain written on the door
while people inside wonder
whether the room still belongs to them.

And still—

we vote.

Millions enter the booth,
close the curtain,
and make the smallest possible declaration:

I am here.

I count.

Perhaps that is where democracy begins again.

Not in making everyone the same,
but in remembering:

every person is one.

Not more.

Not less.

One.

Power prefers shadows.
Fear prefers enemies.
Despair says nothing will change.

Democracy asks something harder:

Look again.

Check the record.

Bring the lantern.

Tell the truth, even when it embarrasses your own side.
Revise what you believed.
Keep the question alive.

We do not have to become louder
to prove that we are awake.

We can stand in the forest

without pretending every tree is healthy.

We can notice the dead branches.
Smell the smoke.
Hear the roots beneath the soil.

And still believe something can heal.

Because awakening is not madness.

Concern is not hatred.

Doubt is not betrayal.

To ask whether the roots are dying
is not an act of destruction.

It is an act of love.

The forest is not finished.

Beneath the dark soil,
something is still reaching.

So we listen—

not for proof that everything is well,

not for proof that everything is lost,

but for the faint, stubborn movement
of the roots.

 

 

Can I Get A Pass?

 Can I Get A Pass?

 

or a little mercy—

the kind that hushes even the shiver in the leaves.

I’ve been laboring since dawn—

the kind of labor counted in acorns, wind, and worry—

said the squirrel, still a quick brown spark in the branches,

flitting from limb to limb like a thought that would not settle,

and the forest answered him with laughter.

The birds, being birds, turned mockery into song—

a bright unruly weather of chirps and shining eyes,

as though all spring had been a rehearsal

for the sweet small privilege of teasing a squirrel.

Hershel sighed for a holiday.

Sally, meanwhile, wanted one as well—

preferably with cake and a patch of afternoon sun,

which seemed, for squirrel ambition, almost courtly.

You’re nuts,

said one voice, and not with kindness enough to make it praise.

Ask again in five minutes, when hunger comes back wearing its old crown.

We all have a stake in this—

if not in heart, then surely in bark and timber.

Then even the deer and mountain lions lost their solemn manners

and laughed as though some ancient burden had skipped them for a day,

and even the trees leaned softly into the joke,

bending in the breeze with that old wooden laughter

that begins in the leaves and ends in the smallest wheeze.

So there it was—

a brief and shining mercy, dressed up as a punchline.