NIGHT WIND, HIGH IN VIMINALIS

In the haste of trees,
    in the mad and shouting haste of trees
       comes a high wind sawing.
          High shouting mad, it comes

at trees thin and waterstarved.
    They groan in their greysand,
       turn poor spent limbs
          loose upon the blast.

All night the lunatic wind
    flays a single driven note
       through the trees' fret,
       grinds it on the moon's drum.

In a twig-spattered hut
    nerves fray like old and feeble growth
        (though no rip of protestant roots
          portends a toppling spar

and life's impaled and battered end).
    But I shrink to a deeper dread.
       Beneath the ululation
          is an earth-deep murmur.

Beneath the krinkled scream,
    an octave down, growling, growing,
       the pent wail gathers.
          And I hear, lost in the land's

damned and nose-thumbed days,
    the pain of the losers, the doomed of the land,
       its things of darkness,
          its tellers and its dreamers,

its chained and broken breadthieves,
    its time-sculpted spirit,
       its witnesses to a benign and lofty carnage,
          their gathered voice, tree-sung,

on the wind's thick hands.

© Pete Hay