Collateral Damage
It listed to the east, liable, the arborist said, to fall
into the street, stave in cars,
a neighbour’s shipshape house and yellow brick wall,
so Friday they came with chainsaws and gloves
and felled it, beginning
with the high-up bendy branches and bright leaves;
by the afternoon’s end the ash tree was strewn
thigh-deep in the yard,
limbs and brushwood good for the mulch machine;
and a rabble of garden birds surveyed the debris
where that morning
their safe nests and lookouts had been.