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CONTRAPUNTAL POEM

KATHLEEN SERLEY


HEY, NEIGHBOR
​


Remember the year we moved to the country
You to a spent farm   I to a cut-over 80
Two city-bred back-to-the-landers bent on stewardship
The trees calling us   calling our families

                                                                     Seeker, let the trees guide you
                                                                     listen to the rustling of their leaves


We breathed easier among the trees
Quieted beneath their canopy
breathing in as they breathed out
we settled, accepting the woods as equal player

                                                                     hear hope in the woodpecker’s rat-tatting
                                                                     heed caution in a crow’s warning caw


It would take us fifty years
to speak of carbon sequestering
Fifty years to talk
about the caterpillars hosted by our oaks

                                                                      follow the criss-crossing deer trails
                                                                      alert to discovery on winding paths


But in all that time we welcomed the coolness
of the woods in mid-summer, admired the burnished
beauty of those oaks in fall   We thinned and planted
planted and thinned shaping the woods

                                                                      enjoy wild apple trees in full bloom
                                                                      alert to porcupines swaying from the treetops


Today I see you from my fence line setting off down
that old logging road on an autumn walk among your trees
Stewards in their own right, they stand tall across the land
Sentinels to your trek as evening shadows lengthen
​
                                                                     match your breath to the forest’s
                                                                     adjust your pace to lengthening shadows




​Kathleen Serley, a lifelong Wisconsin resident, appreciates the way retirement has opened her days to poetry. She serves as Mid-Central VP for Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Solitary Plover, Third Wednesday, Verse Wisconsin and Peninsula Pulse. Her first book of poetry, “Statements Made in Passing,” was published by Water’s Edge Press in Spring 2022.
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