Earth Day Ekphrasis

You still standing trees: You two
with green fringe not yet succumbed
to the swirling mad tangle below:
Look to the right and left of you --
That clearing is not the work of men,
not directly. True some traveler's heel
carried the foreign seed that rooted there,
making ghosts of your shadey friends.
Those mounds are not some farmer's
hay pile. They are all that remains
of trees choked out, smothered, torn
down like the statues of dictators
in a people's uprising.

("Somerset Park," Philadelphia, PA.)