Lily Greenberg

After the Eradication of Brown Tail Moths in Deering Oaks Park

Red oaks glow parkside
in last light, me inside 

knowing it is not tree,
it is stranger. But 

it is tree: the thousand-year
acorn, the thousand moths 

within. The city said the moths
are killing you, but did we 

kill the moths for you? Did we
call the poison good? Oh dominion— 

to treat as we would have it.
To spare only the tree under which 

people sleep. In your dreams,
do we ever wake up? Dear trees, 

wrap your November arms
around our young bodies. 

Forgive us for thinking
we know you—all of you

who drop your skins wide
open to the earth without God,

without the slightest worship of God.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lily Greenberg is a poet from Nashville, Tennessee and the author of In the Shape of a Woman (Broadstone Books 2022). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, On the Seawall, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Eco Theo Review and Cortland Review, among others, and she is the 2023 prize winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review National Poetry Month Contest as well as the 2021 recipient of the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for Poetry. Her work has been funded by Bread Loaf Writers, University of New Hampshire and Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Lily holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and lives in New York where she serves as Poetry Editor of Longleaf Review. Learn more at lily-greenberg.com.