Our dear catalpa, whose angel-headed blossoms
flowered above us without fail each June for over
fifty years, our beloved, stalwart, silent guardian
who watched over this old house like the Lord’s
appointed one, lies fallen on the cold hard ground,
toppled with one fell swoop by some madcap
monster microburst that, truth be told, wreaked
havoc over hundreds of homes around the county.

Our friend Michael, neighbor arborist with a wicked
sense of humor, called the collapse of our Catalpa speciosa
a “wrenching loss,” noting it was—was—the largest
of its kind in all of Massachusetts. Ah, how tall
you were, and proud, and showed so many a sense
of majesty and, yes, quiet comfort, thou, home to God
knows how many woodpeckers, cardinals, and jays, not
to mention honey bees and thieving squirrels and chipmunks.

You, the same proud form our old friend Barry portrayed
with yours truly looking up into your leafy branches,
the same I wrote those poems about from the time our sons
were toddlers, our roughbarked sacred guardian the arborists
came to visit as if on holy ground, surrounded with a heart-
shaped plot of pachysandra woven with laughing hostas and
of course a touch of poison ivy, beneath whose branches
our bird feeder nestled, too-often ransacked by some cunning bear.

And in your dappled shadow: five well-cared-for boxes
(one crushed now), cornucopias of yellow daffodils
and amethyst astilbe and just beyond our red and purple
rhododendrons and burning bush and dogwood we planted
forty years ago when we lost our good dog Sparky.
Gone now, changed, changed utterly as now the tree
morticians piece by piece cart away your broken body.
But not those blossoming late-June-angel-headed memories.

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