Sequoia Poem by Richard Bunch

There were survivors in your family
Too. Before the kingdoms of Benin and
Ashoka’s India, you survived it
All: denying spirit to matter, and
The healing power of rage, captive limbs
Who freed each root’s journey, those mother tongues
Of mutual emptiness. Other limbs
Became the heirs of worms. Through fires your lungs
Yet breathed. Circles of seeds became your skins,
Scars of your history, wood of our myth.
You survived as Lao Tzu died praising yin,
The Black Death cinched the dead, genocide blitzed
Us with ash. But before you’re axed to jade
Your shorn limbs will hold more than this time’s shade.