PAD Chapbook Challenge Day 17

Today's prompt from Poetic Asides: Write a "health" poem. Once again I also used this week's Sunday Whirl word bank for today's poem. The words were: dawn, bring, imminent, rhythm, branches, mince, crack, till, light, single, lick, inner.

Old Oak

Dawn has barely passed to breakfast time

when my neighbor decides to bring down

his tree, a fifty-foot oak in his back yard.

It is sick, he says, brittle and dying,

and an imminent danger to his house,

so he hires tree guys to help him cut it down.

All day I hear the rhythm and crescendo-decrescendo

of those loud, growling instruments, their chain saws;

the clattering, grinding racket of their chipper,

reducing branches to minced-up mulch;

and the occasional crack of a bough or branch

cut mostly through,  splitting and hastening its own

demise, a thump to the ground.  They work

till twilight, and break it all down in a single day.

I, on the other hand, haven't done a lick of work today.

I think I have the flu. My inner hypochondriac, however,

thinks it could be more serious. After all,

it's already November, I've been trimmed and pruned

a few times myself, and I wonder how long it will be

before someone comes to turn me to mulch,

leaving nothing but a stump as my legacy.