Poems! For the Trees! Part Four!

Photo courtesy Heidi Greco.

McLellan Forest, Langley, BC. January 2013.

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There were hundreds of poets who contributed poems to Susan McCaslin's call for submissions to the Han Shan project. As you'll recall, I gussied up a section from "Infestation Lullaby" in Hump...

The project was designed to draw attention to the value of the Langley, BC's McLellan Forest. Late in the fall, City Council in Langley had recently decided to sell the land the forest sits on in order to fund a community centre.

And McCaslin was part of a group determined to save the forest. The Han Shan project was only one of the efforts of the group.

The poems went up in early December. I was on Facebook around that time and saw that poet Heidi Greco had shared photos of the 'anthology.'

I contacted her to see if she had happened to take a picture of my poem. Given that there were more than 200 poems, I didn't think it was likely...but thought I'd ask.

Heidi responded, saying my poem had not been among those she'd photographed.

And I said that was fine, that I was fine with my contribution to the project being ephemeral, that its transience was part of what made it such an interesting site-specific project....

Anyways, a few weeks later I got another email from Heidi. The day before the poems were taken down, she'd gone for another walk in the forest.

And found my rained-on, oh-so-ephemeral poem.