Grand old relic of days gone by
Of my father’s time and my father’s work
Rising bravely from the mossy carpet
Tall as a monument to someone great
Bark thick as grizzly fur, now almost as soft
The telltale notches climbing up like stairs
Where the old handfallers stood on springboards
Working through a morning chopping and sawing
Feeling they were doing something great
All worries cast in shadow for the moment
Striving toward that epic screech and howl
Of greatness crashing down
Setting the whole harvesting process in motion
So men like my dad could fire up their machines
And move that wood on out to the mills

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I have lived surrounded by stumps
The great old first-growth cedars and firs
The more recent smaller ones
Stepped and tufted by powersaws
And for most of my time felt affection
Marking the passage of my kind
Through the cold wilderness of green
Only in recent years come to have qualms
About the sheer number and impersonality
Of vast fields of ever smaller stubs
As corporate efficiency changed everything
And the once-trackless ocean of bush
Shrunk back to crevices and corners
Nor can I ignore the tide of disapproval
Washing in from the cities, leveraged by media
That redefines these symbols of our way of life
As images of wanton destruction and rapine
A view I can’t wholly dispute or reject
While still convinced it misses something



Photo credit: Oregon State University Special Collections, Gerald W. Williams Collection.

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Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and some of his  books include The Men There Were Then, The Sunshine Coast, Patrick and the Backhoe and The Airplane Ride. His selected works, Writing in the Rain, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. He has also been awarded the Order of BC and the Order of Canada. His latest book of poetry is A Mysterious Humming Noise (Anvil, 2019). His previous book of poetry, Ghost in the Gears, was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize.