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