While driving home a backroads way, my gaze to something eerie fell
A topiary tapestry o’erwhelmed a landscape I knew well
Where once were wizened trees and stumps, and sagging sheds lost to neglect
Appeared an emerald shroud, concealing all – no remnants to detect
The battered, bent and barren oaks, so recently exposed and dead
Now take the form in strangling green of giant hulking wraiths instead
A weather-battered cattle barn, now wrapped in seamless verdant vines
No longer shelters livestock; now a ghostly graven Palatine
No tree or bush or even weed can best the vine in nature’s battle
Dying, strangled, smote and smothered ‘neath the kudzu’s noxious mantle
Emperor of all it reaches, conquering Pueraria montana
Destructor of the local flora, driving out its erstwhile fauna
The subjugated landscape makes a quasi-nightmare mise-en-scéne
Its haunting beauty never to reveal the earth beneath again
Though winter force the kudzu’s sleep, the forms entangled in its snare
Will don the veil of brown and brittle husk that kudzu makes them wear
Transformed, the terra familia that I knew well before the siege
Of mile-a-minute conquest by its avaricious tendrilled leaves
In silent witness marks my passing, strange and startling memory’s eye
My sideview mirror’s sidelong glance – Farewell, old earth, goodbye!
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