by Pamela Ahlen
Leave the smartphone home
and roam Thoreauvian,
it’s not too late to delete the techno-tweets—
take to the woods where text is sensory,
scent of leaves, honeysuckle, pine,
language welling up from the earth’s throat
where information resides in hearts of trees—
texture of ash, butternut, beech,
the bee lost in blue gentian reverie,
the sweet tang of berries purpling your tongue.
Thoreau wrote men have become the tools of their tools.
What made Thoreau so prescient?
What madness made us devices of our devices?
Time in the wood’s a stopped clock
velveting the marrow of you.
Listen to the stream’s soliloquy,
the hemlock sigh,
the oven bird squeak its rusty wheel—
no phone vibrating its pseudo-seduction.
photo credit: Irinia Iriser, Unsplash
Pamela Ahlen is a Vermont Long Trail end-to ender and was the first volunteer education chair for the Green Mountain Club in the1990’s. She sat on the Board of Managers of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (then Appalachian Trail Conference)from 2001-2005. Currently Pamela is special events coordinator for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Dartmouth. She compiled and edited Osher’s Anthology of Poets and Writers: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years at Dartmouth. She received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of the chapbook Gather Every Little Thing (Finishing Line Press) and the co-author (with Anne Bower) of Getting in Down on Paper, Shaping a Friendship (Orchard Street Press).