This poem is inspired by:

Some trees in Culver City.  When you walk from the Radisson to Howard Hughes plaza you can see them.  They are embedded in the sidewalk.  I have heard it said often that LA is not a city for walking.  I was fascinated with these trees, though. They have staked their claim on the pavement.  See, they must have been planted quite awhile ago and as they grew, they overtook their allotted area.  Instead of removing them, or removing the pavement, LA has taken the sidewalk cement and sort of just spackled it on around the base of the trees creating a kind of stony slope.  It makes one philosophical.

Held

I am but a little tree

With words as silent as the sea

I'd shift the burden of my mass

And lift my roots from the morass

If trees could walk

With arbor stride

Our branches thwart

The rising tide

We'd jump together all alight

And wish to fall on something right

But just some landscape, angels mute

In cement forests we take root.