The Lost Pines Speak

Vincent Hostak

November 17, 2024

An unlikely belt of tall Loblolly Pines dating back to before the Pleistocene Epoch stands near Bastrop, Tx.  They are separated from their nearest relatives by at least 100 miles.  Those live on the outer edge of a great region of Pineywoods. These cover parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and far East Texas.  The isolated groves in the Hill Country are known as the Lost Pines.

We, the Lost Pines, make our last stand here

in the gravelly soil of Central Texas.

A conclave of lanky strangers, nothing like you,

severed from our forebearer, the mother root

which wades in far off Mississippi muck.

We’re lean, thick-skinned and coppery.

If our shortleaf diadems weren’t so sparse

we’d eclipse the sun and starve the buckthorn.

But we’re not insensitive, that is not our way.

We’ve been shown mercy a time or two

from fires and the lumbermen,

so let us pin our garish yellow catkins to our collars

and proudly stain the plains in Spring.

While, rising from the mustard-glow,

the last of us curl our way toward the sky.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.