Poems by Joseph Stanton
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Grazers
by Joseph Stanton
From Canary Spring 2018
Joseph lives in the town of Aiea on the Leeward side of Oahu, a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A ravine behind his house provides him with a larger than average supply of suburban wildlife.
A forest afflicted on its edges
by cattle, sheep, and goats
begins to lose its understory,
and the story that replaces it
tells of a gradual
eating away, eating away
so that dense forest becomes,
ever so gradually,
by degradation, year after year,
a pasture, lovely in its own way
but no longer a place
where the wild things are.
© Joseph Stanton