I wandered through the wood
And wondered
What would happen
As I walked past the Willows
And Walnuts,
Worried for the world
Beyond the woods.

I watched
This wilderness
Of winding ways
And weathered wills
Where I worshiped the wisdom
Of these weighted monsters-
Magnificent in the marshes,
A million miles
From the mediocrity of man
And his madness,
Mindfully meandering amid
Mulberries, Maples and more
A million trunks
Like magical masts
Making their way
Through mighty mists
As irrepressible roots
Raided through
Rushes and ruins
Of rudimental riches
Rotting around the ground.
From Nature and nurture
To nourishment and nutrients
In nanoseconds
Neath this night
Nowhere near
The noise and nonsense
Of knob-heads
And nincompooptic know-it-alls
Whose knuckles
Gnaw at you needlessly
As they clamber
And claw their way,
Cunning and cankerous,
Across cadavers
Scarcely cold
To claim the crown.

I filed through the forest
And felt the freedom
In its fortune,
Forged far from
Frivolous, foolish fellows
And feared for the future.

I prayed
To pave a path
As pure as
This paradise
That paraded itself
In front of me.

As I parted
I borrowed some branches
To beat back
The bosses and bastards
Bombarding boardrooms
With bombastic beatitudes
Bordering on baseless
Overbearing, big headedness
But thought it better
To bore a path
Beyond these bellowing battles
And brooding barflies.

I wandered through the wood
And wondered what would happen
If we lost the beauty of nature
To the madness of man
And his gluttonous greed?

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly