What life do you imagine you have lived?
I pierced the soil and first touched the sun when your ancestors laid the foundations of their castles in your “old country.” I basked in the sun for hundreds of your years before the conquistadors first saw me. Fire, drought, pestilence I endured; I even bear the blackened scars of lightning strikes. For more than a thousand years I have stood.
But is that an accomplishment you value? Or am I a mere commodity? Did your recent ancestors not fell hundres of my kin? Do you not see ever more profitable uses for me, and for the land I occupy?
And what treasure will you have left when you have felled the last of my kind? What life will you possess after you have plundered the final forest?
These memories were left here with the trees.
Frank J. Tassone 
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