The Green Man

He speaks for the uprooted. A man of sorts, a twiggy Buddha. He who interprets the conferences of frogs, the unpublished works of kestrels and voles. He’s an advocate for the underbelly of a microbial heaven, for every kind of uncouth animalcule. Ancient is he, yet as fresh as tomorrow, in green ponds he fishes for sunlight. He plumps grassy pillows, quilts nests for the slumbering and slippery, gardens all the dewy meadows. He speaks for the bulldozed, the displaced. The native and the nomadic. He sweeps the muddy tracks of iron caterpillars. Bears tell him of how things are going in the suburbs, in swimming pools and trash cans, There must be a treaty. Kits and coyote love him, whistle-Pigs trumpet his approach. Ducks quack his many sermons, may shotguns always misfire. He is a preacher, a teacher to tic and turtle, a bosky fellow, not a straw man, or a hollow but verdant, a green man for me and thee harken now to his leafy lingo for tomorrow he may be only a scarecrow in a long ravaged field.