Michael J. Kolb

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A Forest Rearranged

Some mornings
among tangled roots,
my forest is rearranged.

Not all that once grew
finds its place again.
Seeded thoughts
curl in half-lit shadows,
names slipping away.

Echoes tend themselves,
a phrase glimmering
in the understory,
a name caught
in the hush of wind
before it disappears.

Wild, never wrong,
silence and leaf-fall,
old grief among them.

No map holds this ground.
Saplings rise unnamed,
watered by trust,
by quiet worth.

If anything endures,
it is this stirring hush,
a listening,
a forest still speaking
without me.

Michael J. Kolb is a poet and a professor of archaeology based in Colorado. He writes across disciplinary thresholds, exploring nature, memory, commemoration, and illness, asking what we carry, and what we leave behind. His work appears or is forthcoming in Third Wednesday, Bramble, Sky Island Journal, Eunoia Review, Defenestration, San Antonio Review, Speckled Trout, Moss Piglet, and WestWard Quarterly. He is the author of Making Sense of Monuments (Routledge 2020) and shares his writing on Instagram @michaeljkolb and at substack.com/@michaeljkolb.