They entered Eden
with their saws and axes,
and as Eve watched
from just beyond the gate
they turned the live trees
into timber, a carnage

of chestnut, cedar, alder,
spilling the fruit and
stripping the bark, measuring,
cutting into four-by-fours and
two-by-sixes—numbering
now instead of naming, until

even the complicitous apple
was felled, and the smell
of sawdust was like death
in the nostrils,
and it was evening
and another day.

"The Lumberjacks" first appeared in Linda Pastan's Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998. 
Click here to read about Linda Pastan.

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