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 He who interprets the conferences of frogs, the unpublished works of kestrels and voles.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 dewy meadows. He speaks for the bulldozed, the displaced. The native and the nomadic. He tracks the sins of the truculent muckrakers, the yellow iron caterpillars. He glides over bogs with the frogs. Slips between the stringy and tall, if there are no forested ways he ambles where the wind ruffles. He talks to the bears - they tell him how things are going in the suburbs. Swimming pools and trash cans, have still to be negotiated. There must be a treaty. He is leafy, kits and coyote love him, Whistle-Pigs chirp like sparrows; blow their noses to trumpet his approach. When ducks quack his many sermons shotguns misfire. He is a preacher, a teacher to tics and turtles. He is the bosky bedfellow, not a straw man, or a hollow man – he is variegated and verdant, a green man for me and thee at least for now.