What does he plant who plants a tree?
   He plants a friend of sun and sky;
He plants the flag of breezes free;
   The shaft of beauty, towering high;
   He plants a home to heaven anigh;
      For song and mother-croon of bird
      In hushed and happy twilight heard—
The treble of heaven's harmony—
These things he plants who plants a tree.

What does he plant who plants a tree?
   He plants cool shade and tender rain,
And seed and bud of days to be,
   And years that fade and flush again;
      He plants the glory of the plain;
      He plants the forest's heritage;
      The harvest of a coming age;
The joy that unborn eyes shall see—
These things he plants who plants a tree.

What does he plant who plants a tree?
   He plants, in sap and leaf and wood,
In love of home and loyalty
   And far-cast thought of civic good—
   His blessings on the neighborhood,
      Who in the hollow of His hand
      Holds all the growth of all our land—
A nation's growth from sea to sea
Stirs in his heart who plants a tree.

Sip the sea. Its salt stays on the tongue.
It burns                              like wine
               the open wound.
It heals.
                Do you have the heart to say
the truth? That it is full of strange bacteria,

indifferent to your pain. I move toward spilling out

but I will not. I will let you think the sea
is sacred still.
                       Perhaps, then,
you will try to save it.

Perhaps you’ll stand with me at the shore,
the sky now darkening, watching
the waves eat back the blueblack dunes,
shadowhills of sand, watching each wavecrash
reverberate, a drum that sounded
centuries ago, each crash a spoon scoop
more of sand, a cat’s rough tongue scraping
land back to waves, thinking, how long
until the world is sea again?
With every stone it swallows,
the ocean grows. When it laps at our
peninsulas, we take it for affection,
quiet in its claws, saying to ourselves,
this is just another sort of love, to wait
to see what happens, to stand there watching
as our feet sink in the sand, arms around each others’
waists, hoodies flapping black in the wind, our mouths
unmoving, patient, tired, only just now widening our eyes.

And he entered, great spelunker,
the resonant and ancient darkness,

that empty ventricle keeping
the earth’s heart beating with the silent calls

of bats, their acrid guano blanketing
the cold, stone floor.

Such hollowness, so far beneath the surface,
and yet the sunlit world still stepping

to more infectious rhythms up above
never once tempted him with its pulsations—

that was a land of prattle, and light so bright
it blotted out the rarer glows he sought.

On he walked, no flashlight in his hand.
He closed his eyes, preferring

a darkness of his own to the black
of that slick gullet, the cave he could not stop

from swallowing him. Soon he reached the room
where glowworms dangled sticky threads

to catch unwary insects. They taunted his shut eyes
with hints of incandescence.

He shivered in the dampness of that space,
but in the end,

it was easy for him to slide his eyes awake
in the dark and empty cavern

and count the living stars upon the walls.