Downtown’s ash trees are wrapped in green
Marked so we know the emerald ash borer
Is slouching this way.

The Mongols once had flung whole trees at Baghdad
As they sieged the city, symbols for its citizens
That the end was near, and now I’m

Looking at the dead bough that hangs over our house
Branches peeling off in thunderstorms
New dead dendrites each morning.

Doesn’t the neighborhood smell great, he said,
With all those lindens in bloom?
But they found the ash borer in Omaha,

And, pinching the bug’s red abdomen, the entomologist
Who found it in the middle of the trunk
Eating for its life, she

Showed off the oval green slip and
Traced the maze it ate in the bark, pausing for just a moment
To, I think, notice the beauty,
Before she carried on with the press conference.

– Greg Walklin

Author’s Note: “The Siege of Baghdad” is my first published poem. It came from my ongoing—and growing—appreciation of trees, and trying to think about their history and experience the same way that I think about human experience. The disappearance of ash trees around my hometown has always felt like a portent, and it’s something I’ve found myself writing about again and again.