Stumps and Paper Promises [Wraith]
Arbor Day shows up late to its own funeral, stumbling into a clearing that used to be cathedral-tall and breathing,
Now just a bald patch of dirt and jagged stumps jutting out of the ground like gravestones that never got their names carved,
Splintered trunks leaning at wrong angles, bark peeled back like old scabs,
The ghosts of trunks that used to hold up entire summers hovering where branches once argued with the wind.
Once, this place was leaf-noise and filtered sunlight and things nesting in places you never got to see,
Roots gripping the earth like a secret handshake, a thousand rings of memory hidden under every rough palm of bark,
Now the only rings are on charred cross-sections,
Brown circles counting years nobody will bother to read as the stumps rot quietly under a sky that doesn’t shade you anymore.
The wind has no patience for ceremonies here,
It drags grit and ash across the clearing, kicks old sawdust into the air like cheap confetti from a party thrown in honor of extinction,
Rattles a couple of plastic Arbor Day banners sagging off a chain-link fence at the edge of the cut,
The kind they print by the box,“Plant a Tree, Save the World,” stapled to a landscape where somebody already hit “delete” and walked away.
The few saplings they stuck in the ground last year lean like hungover teenagers after a night of bad decisions and cheap liquor,
Thin plastic ties biting into their soft necks,
Roots never quite taking hold in soil that remembers being scraped, bled, bulldozed and poisoned,
The ground flinches every time another ceremonial shovel bites in for a photo op,
All teeth, no apology.
There is a plaque by the road, because there is always a plaque,
Polished metal bragging about “Partnership with Nature,”Names of sponsors etched in proud lines while the hill behind it looks like somebody shaved it with a chainsaw and left the clippings to rot,
A kid in a bright green shirt stands taking selfies with the plaque,
Tagging it with little leaf emojis while his shoes sink into the mud where a root system used to run deeper than his future.
If you listen closely, past the traffic and the fake speeches and the snapping of oversize scissors on ceremonial ribbon,
You can still hear the old canopy complaining under its breath,
Leaves that used to argue with storms now stuck as a dry rustle in your head,
Branches that held lovers, birds, bored kids, and lightning reduced to a pile of uniform logs by the roadside,
All the differences between them sanded smooth and wrapped in the same barcoded smile.
The air has that hollow echo that only happens when nothing is absorbing the noise anymore,
Every shout bounces back harder,
Every chainsaw memory still buzzing long after the teeth stopped spinning,
The space between stumps is full of things that never grew,
Shadow of a tree that might have been,
Uncounted nests that never got built because someone decided this view looked better without shade.
The roots are still down there, curling around each other like fingers grasping an invisible throat,
Some cut clean, some ripped jagged when the machines dragged trunks away,
They twitch with every rainfall that dares to intrude,
Pulling at water that has nowhere left to go but sideways down the naked slope,
Carrying the last bits of good soil away like stolen jewelry in a flood.
A stray crow circles the clearing, annoyed at the lack of high perches and convenient complaints to shout from,
It lands on a stump, cocks its head, and lets out a sound that is way too close to a laugh,
Watches the volunteers plant ornamental shrubs along the parking lot edge,
Perfectly spaced, perfectly shallow,
Roots trained to never interfere with pavement, never crack a sidewalk, never cause trouble,
Nice, polite greenery that knows its place.
Somewhere, a teacher explains to a line of kids that Arbor Day is about respecting trees,
While they press a ceremonial sapling into the same scarred earth that watched its ancestors hauled away for pallets and holiday catalogs,
Little hands pat the dirt with hopeful clumsiness,
Their faces bright with the kind of belief that hasn’t yet been invoiced,
Nobody mentions how many acres were chewed up just to make the cardboard displays they are standing in front of.
You stand at the edge of this wrecked grove,
Hands in pockets, listening to the ghosts of trunks tapping their spectral fingers on the inside of your ribs,
Every stump another question mark jammed into the ground,
Every freshly printed Arbor Day poster another punchline in a joke nobody wants to admit is actually the truth.
You remember climbing trees that are no longer here,
Scraped knees and sap on your palms,
The way the world shrank and widened at the same time when you were up in the branches pretending leaves could keep you safe,
Now kids climb jungle gyms in plastic playgrounds surrounded by hot asphalt,
Their hands come away smelling like rust and sunscreen instead of resin and dirt.
Some days you want to scream into the empty clearing until the sound grows roots,
Until the echoes knit themselves into something that can’t be mulched into silence,
Other days you just press your boot against a stump and count the rings,
Muttering a clumsy apology under your breath to a tree that did all its work long before you showed up,
Oxygen, shelter, shade, soil, fruit, cover, carbon, quiet,
And in return, got a day on the calendar and a guided tour with branded shovels.
Arbor Day drags itself across the scorched calendar like a tired saint nobody really listens to anymore,
A square on a wall chart pinned next to sales events and deadlines,
It arrives to find the forest gone,
The parking lot full,
The hardware store busy selling more saw blades than seedlings,
And still, despite all that, someone—maybe you, maybe some kid with dirt under their nails and no patience for speeches—Takes one small sapling, plants it too deep or too shallow,
Gets it wrong but gets it done anyway.
The sky has no opinion on whether it was enough,
The ghosts of the old canopy just lean against their invisible trunks and watch,
Judging, but in that tired parental way trees do when you finally try,
Maybe the sapling makes it, maybe it snaps in the next storm,
Maybe the whole clearing grows back in fifty stubborn, ugly, uneven years,
Maybe it turns into a mall.
The poem never promises a comeback, doesn’t hand you some clean redemption arc with seed catalogs and smiling farmers,
It just sits with you in the wreckage and admits this hurts,
Admits we did this,
Admits Arbor Day feels like leaving flowers on a grave you helped dig.
And still, there you are with a cheap plastic spade and one small root ball,
Sweating in the wrong shoes,
Cursing the heat, the bureaucracy, the distance between what this used to be and what you are standing in,
And you push that soil back in anyway,
Whisper something soft and embarrassed to a twig that has no reason to trust you,
Then walk away hoping it never learns your name.