And God said…let them have dominion…over all the earth…
Genesis 1:26 King James Version
The ground vibrated beneath my feet.
My skin waffled, rippled
up and down my arms and legs.
Over the engine’s roar, I felt
the trees shriek,
shriek, as they were ripped from the earth.
A stand of conifers, where this spring
a hummingbird swooped
his mating ritual
and last winter wild turkeys gathered,
ravaged to make room
for houses, sodded lawns.
An enormous machine yanked
thirty-foot pines from the soil
as if they were weeds pulled by a child.
Pine bodies stacked
like corpses of young soldiers–
a battlefield after the siege.
No taps were played, no bugle,
no wind-stirred branches to whisper a dirge.
Was it you who questioned the cost
of such avarice to this erstwhile Eden?
Bulldozers are parading down main street.
Has anyone asked what dominion means?
This poem first appeared in The Ocotillo Review (2024).
—
Bonnie Wehle lives in Tucson, Arizona where she serves as a docent at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Her work has appeared in Coal Hill Review, Rockvale Review, River Heron Review, Sky Islands Journal, The Ocotillo Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, A Certain Ache: Poems in Women’s Voices, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2022. Her chapbook, Little Altars, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.
