The Callery Pear/NYC

 

The Callery Pear Survivor Tree
( Brooklyn News Service)

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Even with our pretty white flowers

and fancy autumn dresses,

people call my kind a pest,

invading proper gardens

and blooming

where we aren’t wanted,

the leaves of so many sisters

sprayed with toxins

or their heads 

lopped off with a chain saw,

their stumps

painted with poison

to annihilate them and make room 

for natives only.

On the day the towers fell,

everything changed—

my crown was severed 

by the weightiness 

of broken steel and stone—

my bones cracked—

my roots and limbs snapped—

my trunk blackened.

Mortally wounded, still I pushed 

my leaves above the rubble 

into the lingering smoke and ash.

Tender hands found me, 

nursed me back to health

and brought me home again.

The towers are gone.

Throughout the land

my sisters remain reviled,

yet here I proudly stand,

a symbol of hope and survival.

Once a dove nested in my boughs. 

Every spring I wait for her return.