we are the trees
we are the trees
Verse: Hans Boerli
Photographs: Seline Skoug 2025 |
I have never owned a tree. None of my people has ever owned a tree ~ though my family’s life-path winds over centuries’ blue heights of forest.
Forest in storm, forest in calm ~ forest, forest, forest, through all the years.
My people were always a poor people.
Always.
Children of life’s hard, iron-frosted nights.
Strangers
own the trees, and the soil, the stone-heaped soil my fathers cleared by the light of the moon’s lamp.
Strangers with smooth faces and pretty hands and their car always waiting outside the door.
None of my people has ever owned a tree. And yet we own the forests by our blood’s red right.
Rich man, you with the car and the bankbook and stock in the timber company: you can buy a thousand acres of forest, and a thousand acres more,
but you can’t buy the sunset or the whisper of the wind or the joy of walking homeward when the heather blooms along the path.
No, we own the forests, the way a child owns its mother.
