Tree by Kurt Luchs

​What does it mean to be
planted in one patch of soil
for your entire existence?
To stand there forever
because your lone leg
can’t go anywhere.
The struggle for survival
no less bitter, overshadowed
by this one’s leaves,
out-drunk by that one’s roots.
An orchestra of bark flutes
played by each passing wind.
The winds which one day
will lay you out
among the corpses of your kind
to slowly become the loam
in which you were born.
There is a sort of horror
to it all, so much beauty too,
reaching for sky and sun
like you really mean it.
Putting the rest of us to shame
who walk where we will
heads down, looking into the earth
and seeing nothing
for what it is.


Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award, the 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny)(2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. His poetry chapbook, The Sound of One Hand Slapping, was issued in 2022 by SurVision Books. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.