Susanna Lang, Chicago, Illinois and Uzès, France
For the Rivers, For the Trees
If a river has legal rights
the lawyer asked
who will be ready to die for her?
The rivers speak to us in floods
but no judge allows a flood inside the courtroom.
In drought they sink into the soil, an eloquent silence.
(the Colorado, the Whanganui, the Tavignano)
And the trees, do the trees have rights
or only the responsibility to breathe in our waste?
They speak to us in the afternoon,
their leaves are tongues.
Our fires dance in their canopies,
feast on their limbs.
(Aleppo pines, sequoias, oaks and chestnuts)
In the desert of Thar, Amrita Devi and her daughters
were beheaded as she embraced a khejri tree
the maharaja wanted for his palace.
Travelers in another desert praise a solitary khejri
whose roots reach down 150 feet to find water:
they believe it’s the river that ran through Eden.
(the Atrato, the Maumee, the Rhône)
In the end, we will all die for the rivers,
ready or not,
we will die for the trees.
On an Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca
Blackberries swell and turn sweet at the edge of the road
where a man stops his truck to talk with me.
North of here, in another country, fires are burning—
the air tastes of smoke, even this far from the flames.
Eagles are common now, the man tells me.
When his children were small, playing
in a mud pit near the house, he watched for eagles,
afraid the children looked like prey.
There is a quarry nearby, abandoned
after the lime ran out. The kiln is still standing,
and cedars that fed the kiln have grown back,
at least on tracts set aside for them.
There is never much rain in the summer.
Everything ripens toward fire.
Susanna Lang’s chapbook, Like This, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Books. Her translation of Baalbek by Nohad Salameh was published by Atelier du Grand Tétras (2021) and her third full-length collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, appeared in 2017 (Terrapin). Her poems and translations have appeared in publications such as Prairie Schooner, december, Delos, American Life in Poetry and The Slowdown. Her translations include poetry by Yves Bonnefoy, Souad Labbize and Hélène Dorion.
