To The Grassy Bald We Named Sweet Bay

by BILLIE HINTON

If you remember the elk coming to graze, livestock driven up your steep path by neighboring farmers in summertimes a hundred years ago, the tickle of wildflowers in the breeze, if you wait for the golden-winged warblers in spring and notice there aren’t as many as there used to be, we are trying to recover you. From the burn of encroachers making fires, shooting guns, pickup trucks with oversized tires cutting circles until the wounds appear. If you wince at the tiny slices made by beer and liquor bottles smashed with golf clubs leaving glittering piles of brown and blue glass, we clear the debris away, pick out the embedded shards until our fingers bleed, hang the chains the big oaks offer to wear on your behalf when the gate meant to protect you is ignored.

If you need time to heal we will give it, careful mowing between the rains, no tires or fires or wounding humans, just us, treading lightly in hiking boots, swooning in your beauty, taking photos of blue skies and layers of mountains, wild grasses and native flora beneath a healing sun, deep drink of rain, caress of wind. If you feel the softness of snow left clean of human footprint, ornaments of ice the only glitter, take these as remedies for what was done. The warblers will return, the saw-whet owls, perhaps an elk cow nearly ready to calve, alone until she calls upon her kind to join her. Deer will tread lightly through your trees, whistling when a coyote rambles the forest edge, rabbits will graze then freeze in the dusk. We’ll visit too, but on tiptoe, quietly in awe.