Petition for Raven

Envelop her with birdsongs,
shaking the cherry tree outside her window. She
blazes with longing for those songs. Let
all the trees with shallow roots
be spared in their dustyness, and allowed to live forever.
What can I do, besides stilted rhetoric
to make them stop?
I’m in a hot house office,
she’s too disabled to chain herself to a tree,
and we don’t have a hundred women to back us up.
I got the names of two tree experts
who said they would come for free.

It’s help the size of a bird’s egg,
but I don’t know what else to do.
Action Seven News,
get a voodoo kit from Haiti —
I’m a white straw in the wind,
tell me what else to do.

A friend’s doctor said
for too much electromagnetic field,
lie down on the earth three times a day
in order to think more clearly.
Maybe we’ll try that.
Because she needs the enigmatic mastery of birds,

needs green air as a well,
touch the workers’ hearts with misgiving,
so all of them will hesitate to chainsaw
what feels like her own skin to her.
Help them remember how they loved a tree house
as a child. When they needed to cry,

they went there.
Put balm on their hard hands — let the trees live.
If they don’t stop, send a bolt of lightning.
And now, in the power vested in us by simply being alive,
I will send chi to those trees,
and she will put to sleep the plumbers

who said the trees must go.
Eternal field of intuition,
send a bolt of lightning
to crack all of us open.