Trees Are Overrated 
by Michael Doyle

Speaking of paradigms outdated
It turns out trees are overrated
This thought comes I am knee-deep
In a prairie's secrets to keep

In the verdant landscape, songbirds sing
Providing a soundtrack to the blessed things
Dancing blue granma and sand dropseed
Trace the passages prairie dogs quietly read

Once upon 80 million years ago
The first shoots of grass began to grow
An odd weed vying for room on the forest floor
Flowing into impossible numbers hard to ignore

Homo sapiens arose from this as a grass people
Where savanna skies formed our first steeple
Today, the suffering of grave damage brings a decline
Disposable as grasslands hoping for a sign

Arboreal chauvinism flows in a tyranny of trees
Truly needed velds are ignored amidst the pleas
As waist high golden-grass shimmers in its waves
A pendulum swings like a scythe across the graves

Of a world that seeks protection beyond all cost
Not knowing what to do to preserve it before its lost
The grasslands that hold the secret in their soil
And without which it matters little how man might toil

Against the slow-motion tug-of-war that chases
The ebb and flow of forest and grassland traces
Each is overturned in a narrative of human destruction
That offers the present and future its instruction

As it turns out in the true history of procession
There is not a naturalness nor one way succession
In its biome awareness, there are lessons of disparity
That only recently has come to be known in clarity

Despite the seeming sameness of apparent simplicity
The native grasslands are true bastions of biodiversity
Like the tip of the proverbial iceberg, it's the roots
Meaning as much as flowers blooming like cheap suits

Fires are for the savanna as the rains for the forest
Each has it's ways and needs that thrive in this contest
Life around the world finds its way past its vulnerability
As each grass blade turns as if to stress its capability

A sea of green is transformed into a technicolor of flowers
That brings the glory to the glorious of this finest hour
There's a little of this left for those who care to see
Out beyond the cities and forests are the history of prairie

This then is not simply something disposed of as a big empty
It is the pages of the past unraveled in surviving prairie
That must be allowed to be conserved, restored, and to grow
If we, as to humanity, are to get past the ugly and truly know

(c) July 25, 2022  Michael Doyle
All Rights Reserved