After an Ice Storm

by Jeremy Troyer

Outside my window, branches fall
from the ice of a long day.
The winter rains did not nourish them,
and now in the darkness, I hear them cracking
outside my draped window.
And the world has become an ancient thing,
brittle, uncontrolled.

It tore a limb from the tallest pine I ever knew;
that tree, as a child, that I saw rise
head and shoulders above all evergreens in Virginia.
The storm-blasted top did not dissuade me—
I thought that when oak and aspen had fallen,
this one would stand untouched.

In the dark, it lies a corpse among many,
tall, wise, dead.


Jeremy Troyer enjoys happiness and sadness, and worries about a lot of things that never actually happen.


Photography by Kenneth Godoy

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