Post Flood Cleanup

SALVAGING IN SELKIRK

A quartet of cacophonic buzzes

As trees are ripped apart

    to protect the people walking

    under the canopy of leaves.

The ice, the flood, the softened earth

Have ravaged trees beyond repair.

 

Another sound occasionally

Drowns out the buzzing saws—

    the chipper chews small branches

    making mulch for garden use.

 

I sit or stand aside

While the Bobcat grapple loads are brought up to my truck.

    I wait, I watch, I lazily relax

    as load after load is dumped into the box.

 

Seven men harmoniously functioning as one

To drop, to trim and cut the trees

and then to chip and load

with little waste of timber or of time.

 

The filled box weighs down the truck

The eighth man, that's me,

    jumps up to bring

    the firewood home.

I drive, I dump and then return

To repeat the process o'er and o'er until the salvage job is done.

 

Written while waiting at the cleanup job

09-07-06