unfinished

Some stumps of felled hemlocks may be kept on life support for decades by adjacent relatives, with their interconnected roots serving as feeding tubes. Other species might send up new sprouts, but that’s not within the hemlock’s skill set. You can recognize living stumps by the scar tissue that continues to grow over the cut, adding new growth rings, trying somehow to recover.

unfinished
with its commitments
living stump

the spring sun now
only a taste

Thanks to my hiking buddy L. for spotting this and another living stump nearby on a walk near Huntingdon, PA yesterday. In her honor I used a font called Slyfaen (it’s an inside joke). I couldn’t compress everything I wanted into a haiku, so it became a tanka. So this isn’t properly a haiga (or, with the prose, a haibun) but something similar.