The Hanging Tree

The Live Oak tree stood half-way up the hill.
Forests were above, with canyons below
and on a nearby rock
a Temescal Indian carved
"a Chief died here."

 

There were boys, who years ago,
climbed its dying branches
and shot imaginary Indians
through windows of forts fashioned
from salvaged barns and sheds.

 

Old boards, rusted nails and bits of rope,
the pieces which weren't cut down
or rotted and gnawed, were all that remained
when they chopped it down today.

 

But before then, before the boys,
there were men with their denimed legs
dangling in the midday sun, with their
booted feet swaying in the canyon wind,
until, like a pendulum slowing with time,
they stopped.

 

Maybe it was the planting of bountiful
citrus groves or the paving of the
Butterfield Stage route
which caused the legs to stop swinging:
If no horses, then no thieves.

 

No one remembers when the tree
began to whither, when its foliage
gave way to nothing more than
gnarled branches, silvering and
drying in the sun.

 

But I have often wondered if its glory,
first raised as shelter from sun
and harbor from rain, began to buckle
under the weight of the swaying men
and their sins.

Reviews

[Looouise]

But I have often wondered if its glory,
first raised as shelter from sun
and harbor from rain, began to buckle
under the weight of the swaying men
and their sins.

^^Wow,
that last stanza was somehow unexpected to how the poem would end.
Very well done.
It does make you wonder after reading that poem.