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.