Here's a poem for the Christmas season. It first appeared in one of my favorite journals, the Iron Horse Literary Review, and then in my latest book, Lapse Americana. 

CEDARS

They are not native to this place

but have rushed the grassy hill,

an infantry in spiky green.  Go back

a century and the prairie was

unbroken, Donne’s gold to airy thinness beat,

but now the extension man

says we have lost 3 million acres

of our herd’s dominion. 

From my old bedroom window,

I could trace the seeds’ progression,

watch the cedars march

over the pasture and beyond

the barbed wire at its back. 

One December my father

asked the rancher who owned

all the land around us

for permission to cut a few cedars

to sell as Christmas trees. 

The rancher said he wished

we’d take them all, and we took

all we could.  Rising early to a dry,

cold day and a wind like fire

over the prairie, we waded

into a morning tide of scrub oak

and eastern red cedar,

where we took turns with the saw,

one bending to cut, the other straight up

with an arm through the biting green

to steady the trunk

until the stump let it loose. 

We sold enough to make the ride

home merry in the darkening air

and to cheer the little kitchen

where my mother laid ground

meat in a well-greased pan

while my sisters set the table. 

Outside the wind

ripped through the ragged

arms of the cedars,

their red and shaggy roots

deep in alien clay.