The Giant That Fell on The Man
26 Dec 2019—Hiker Killed by Falling Giant Redwood in Muir Woods
Two hundred feet
is a very long time.
Four feet across, by
an application of π,
must be a full dozen
feet round, more rings
than an Indian wedding.
Subhradeep only desired
a long walk along that path,
that courses an untroubled way
thru Muir’s red-hearted cathedral.
The tree, having survived
the saws of ten thousand
lumberman, the campfires of
great armies of Boy Scouts, and
the cacophonous horrors that
attended the second millennium,
Wished only to remain plumb,
long enough to reach a few
more branches, up and up thru
the ancient shadows, to prospect
for the Gold of California suns.
In the end, it was only the
weight of raindrops, and the
insufferable consequence of time,
meeting a man who had a tender
curiosity about a place of giants,
who took five steps too many, or
maybe five steps too few.
Daniel Thomas Moran, born in New York City in 1957, is the author of sixteen collections of poetry. In the Kingdom of Autumn, was published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland in 2020, who also published his previous collection, A Shed for Wood, in 2014. His Looking for the Uncertain Past was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2005. He has had some four hundred poems published in close to twenty different countries. In 2005, he was appointed Poet Laureate by The Legislature of Suffolk County, New York. His collected papers are being archived by The Dept. of Special Collections at Stony Brook University. He is a retired Clinical Assistant Professor from Boston University's School of Dental Medicine, where he delivered the Commencement Address in 2011. He is Arts Editor for The Humanist magazine in Washington, DC. He and his wife Karen live in Webster, New Hampshire.