Pine’s Prayer against Lumberjacks

Red-buzzing-spindle-bud,
Orange-lightning-clover-scale,
Yellow-moon-blowfish-mud,
Green-crater-raindrop-prayer,
Blue-turtle-stamen-flood,
Violet-paw print-sulphur-hail,
Black-birdsong-limestone-sea—
the smallest pea’s brain-symphony.

They’ll break the forest’s velvet sleep
with axes, fires’ glowing eyes.
With fingers feathered omens deep,
while breathing, river, river, why
and how and what their digits creep
with numbers, dead machines that fly,
then river, river glowing blush
of sadness, killing darkness lush.

Grayling ghosts, forgotten fugue,
lumberjack, log, and hook. Buck
whose antlers number twenty-two
will crash the two-legs’ temporal luck
and fold all creatures’ blackest blue—
grayling ghosts, the galax-crux
trans-minnow mud, the acorn
sprouting fish-dust form.

Brandi George grew up in Ovid, Michigan. Her first book of poetry, Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), won the gold medal in the Florida Book Awards, and her second collection, Faun, is a play in verse (Plays Inverse, 2019). Her poems have appeared in such journals as Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets 2010, Ninth Letter, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Iowa Review. She has been awarded residencies at Hambidge Center for the Arts and the Hill House ISLAND residency, and the Time & Place Award in France. She teaches writing at FSW in Fort Myers, Florida.