Pinecones by Terry Jude Miller

Chamber of infant trees,
a cough from limbs litters
them across dry needles—
pick-up-sticks, interlaced
into a dun thatch of receiving.

My grandchildren, the wisest of us,
gather the fallen into shirtfronts fashioned
into baskets, they count each treasure,
place them on the porch.

Then meticulously arrange them,
sort by size, smallest to largest,
each having a distinct personality
of a possible forest.

What’s at stake in such collections?
I consider what the children of Ukraine
and Gaza gather in lieu of lost trees.
What fills their tattered cloth baskets?
What do they bring to savaged fields?

My grandchildren prepare silent earth
for the planting of freed pinyons,
place lovingly each like a wrapped corpse
in cool soil, where, in the exuberance
of time, the buried will be forgotten.

 

Terry Jude Miller, lives in Houston, working in academia. His poems have received multiple Pushcart nominations. One of Miller’s poems will appear in the Spring 2026 issue of Rattle. In 2024, his work was published in Sontag Mag, Feed the Holy, Encore, Equinox, Trigger Warning Magazine, Exomorphosis, Ars Sententia, The Nature of Things, The Bayou Review, Boundless, the Poetry At Round Top Anthology, and several other literary publications. Miller is the former 1st Vice Chancellor of the National Federation of States Poetry Societies.