December 11, 2020

My Journey to God

Timber

From this barred window,
Browning at the edge of a grass field,
I behold those crooked pines,
Lines of sap oozing freely
Down the barkless spots on their trunks,
Perhaps weeping, remembering a time
In youth when they were green.
Orange bands bright like nooses
Strangle them, condemn them.
No longer part of the living eco-system,
Different somehow – infested, an eyesore,
Or carriers of fungus or death rot contagion –
They are marked for death, quarantined,
Anxiously awaiting their executioners.
Do they contemplate that fate?
Are they conscious, struggling to breathe,
Senses atwitter, ever vigilant,
Listening for the thwock! Of looming axes,
Whose vibrations tremble every dry, brown needle?
And when they have joined the fallen
Paralyzed and prone on the forest floor,
Lingering in death unbeknownst to others
To be hacked in pieces and hauled off,
Do they scream sharply when heaped upon the pyre?
Finally consumed. Just ashes. Dead and gone.
Will there be something more for them
Than numbing oblivion, finality?
Is there someplace eternal, fertile,
Beside a tranquil river with lots of sunshine
Waiting to greet the roots of their spirit?
Or can they focus only upon the culling
Coming along today or tomorrow, or the next,
To all living things eventually,
Even the men here on death row,
Isolated, graying, dying like those pines?
Perhaps they are resigned in knowing
That much too soon, to even the mighty,
Something comes along to cut us all down.
And maybe they dread only the arbitrary waiting.

By William LeCroy
 

(William LeCroy was a federal death-row inmate at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute who was executed on Sept. 22. He wrote this poem in 2011 while on death row. As of this issue going to press, the federal executions of Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois were set for Dec. 10 and 11, respectively.) †

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