THE PINE TREE AND THE REACHING Poem by Peter Verhelst

In the afternoon the cicadas swarm in the treetops
come evening they drift away from us into the valley
taken in tow by thousands of mammoths

why thousands of mammoths leap from rock to rock
with retracted legs head forward here at night
after night - even though they are extinct

head in neck eyes shut we sway up and down
forming new constellations
barely for a second they flare up

in a thousand years somebody in this same spot -