Maura High

And the Living is Easy

Petunias loll in their clay pots, stumps
and peelings on the compost heap.

They say, “There is plenty of time,
it is like this everywhere.”

I know this is a lie, a local
pleasure. But still, I am comforted.

Later, I will boil a syrup for the hummingbirds,
and in the dusk we will watch them swoop.
 

Clearcut

Craig Tract of the Bolin Forest, Orange County, North Carolina

A forest remembers what to do

after a death, after
the first shocks and panic,

in the disarray and silence.

I think it does not grieve
for itself as we might grieve for it.

It grows. Toward a future

written in its genes, horseweed
and crabgrass, suckers, seeds

blown in, washed down

into the tractor ruts.
I finger some green leaves,

remembering the shade,
touch slash and stumps

and tree-rings, remembering

the trees; and the cracked mud,
remembering pine needles, thick

layers of them below the loblollies.
 

Maura High, originally from Wales, but settled now in North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in the New England Review, Southern Review, and Tar River Quarterly.