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The Giant That Fell on the Man, a poem by Daniel Thomas Moran



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.