Publication in Better Than Starbucks Journal 11/2022
Many thank to Editor, Vera Ignatowitsch for publishing the following poem
What We Can Undo
The drone and crash begin.
A wood chipper brays, silver teeth
gnash the tree’s branches as fiercely
as amid sparks and whine, you weld
fifty steel arcs, end to end, to lift
a new sculpture skyward.
The surgeon snips away twigs, aims
a chainsaw precisely into the collar. With a rope
he lowers the autumn-tinged diadem to the ground
as you glaze each arc red,
green and yellow to suggest leaves
caught in a sudden updraft.
Such mastery, the making
and the taking down.
Diana Cole, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is author of Songs By Heart (Iris Press, 2018), and has published poems in numerous venues including Poetry East, Spillway, and Verse Daily. She is an editor for The Crosswinds Poetry Journal.