A hundred feet tall, sixty feet wide
row on row clear down the street,
six blocks from our front door
on Arlington Avenue to the First
Congregation Church, elms,
their arched canopy a cathedral.
Slivers of light cast on shoulders,
shade stretched curb to curb
as my brother and I strode to keep
up with father, long-legged ahead, of us.
Mom clasped my hand. “Be quicker.”
But I wanted to be like understory
beneath great green vaults and buttresses
not confined inside of stained-glass
shimmerings. I wanted light to extend
upward as if the whole august world
reached up, grasped at the apex
that rose to bless everything,
yet one summer as if someone
had unwound creation, one upper
branch, then two, seemed scorched
by a red-hot iron, burnt up leave
clumps withered. Dutch elm disease
had the hisses of venomous snakes
to it. Soon street by street, elms,
their guts eaten by a beetle, barred
from water, starved from nutrients,
were dead, cut down, heaped
like war torn sanctuaries. The hapless
sky left as if faith, deracinated, was
carted away with my childhood—nothing
left but its blue scar to comfort us.
—
Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of three novels, River Crossed (2024), The Deception of the Thrush and Those Close Beside Me. He has also published five books of poems including Twist (2025), All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press). He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their three dogs, five fish, and twenty birds.
