Clearcut

Thousands of people have contacted my constituency office expressing their deep concern about forestry policy and practices in British Columbia.

The messages are either generated from a third party service delivering a form email or they are just independent responses to the daily news and social media posts.

Recently I received a nice note from poet, and Order of British Columbia recipient, Wendy Morton encouraging my work. She shared with me one of her poems about what she is seeing in our forests. Wendy allowed me to publish it here.

CLEARCUT

Here, the watersheds are called:
DeMamiel, Veitch, Charters, Wildwood.
The creeks: Sambrio, Loss, Sandcut,
Kirby, Tugwell, King, Juliet.

Then: cutblocks, clearcuts:
grappler skidder, feller buncher, crawler dozer.
The liquidated landscape, broken,
the creeks, lost.
The watershed, their forests: a wasteland.