The Stump

by E.G. Burrows

In the squat book of my yard
a stump the rains fifty years,
a hundred, have rotted, jagged
bone to the gum, not a novel
thing, but the less that is there,
the more of me it contains.

Arms of huckleberry stream down
over the sides, too many
tentacles for one creature, rather
to hold the wood in: a wounded man
in the arms of a woman,
an old man in the arms of a child.
           

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