Navarro Forest--By Greg Gregory--United States

Navarro Forest

The light glows through the canopy of Redwoods.

The light moves, shifts shadows on ferns, on us.

We walk through them to the picnic table.

The small clearing is empty.

The weathered table speaks in cracked initials

Whose life was D.K.'s or J.W.'s?  Why did R.M. love C.L.?

Carvings are meetings, and we have arrived too late.

The ciphers stay locked in their own opaque stories.

They suggest.  They tease.  We imagine.

We hear the invisible river distant, soft in the huge trees.

It flows to the coast.  It flows like time.

Time weathers wood.  It weathers stories.  It always has. 

We will miss them when we’ve left.  The carvings whisper

on the tissue of the wood.  In our summer sandals we are happy,

for a time, under the canopy’s mid-day light.

Greg Gregory is retired, but worked in educational media for over 30 years.  His first love has always been language and the printed word.  He has been published in the US, Canada, and England in publications including California Quarterly, Windsor Review, Poetry Nottingham, and The Aurorean.