In comparison

Beaufort range, Vancouver Island, Canada

In my hometown,
on the west coast,
the mountains are big
and the people small –
in comparison.

There snow blinds
mountain peaks and hides
the missing trees, fills
the gashes where axes
hacked through the forest,
and left mountains
of wooden bodies raw
and critically wounded.
Poor saps.

There was a time
when I returned to
my west coast home
from my adopted home
in Newfoundland.
A rare two-coaster,
I felt neither here
nor there
in my hometown. Yet,
the people demanded
an explanation
– from me –
for the fur-flung murder
of east coast seals.

They wore bladed outrage
and climbed their dudgeon deftly
without a whiff of irony
even as they lopped the tops
of their own homegrown firs,
800 years in the making,
asserting the value of their plank
above those eastern butchers.

They rode the tips of their trees,
sawed through bloodless bark,
yipped as they toppled
the lives of fur hunters
who balanced on floes
on that other island
on that other ocean
they couldn’t see,
deafened by their absolute
superiority and the fact that
trees don’t scream.

In my hometown
the mountains are big
and the people taller –
in comparison –
now that the trees are gone.