Serotinous by K.A. Hays

I found a print of this poem as I was cleaning out my closet last week... I think one of my mom's friends gave it to me in a card for graduation last year. Poetry is something that I am not very good at and don't read a lot of, but every once in awhile one catches me.

Serotinous
K.A. Hays

We should learn from them: the copse
of pitch pines leaning into a mohawk, all needle
and warted twig. If someone lit a blaze

out here, they wouldn't blink; they have,
in fact, grown dormant buds made

to open in such terror. Good idea for us
to fashion, like them, root collars - so the body
cooked to the nub, buds gone, another self

might climb out cough, unfold greenly -
though safer still, for the populace, to be schooled

in serotinous cones, to learn to lock our seed
in a resin that melts off only in fire
so if the bud and root and trunk are cooked,

the seeds are saved, and spring from the charred earth
after the dumb maples and oaks, with their studied

aesthetics of leaf and even shade, samaras
and acorns have gone. The pitch pines welter,
clawed on ledges with their roots in near-rock,
fed by the ground's toxic metals. Remember -
if not for the arbitrary crash that startled off

a piece of the planet, forming moon and tilting
the earth off-kilter, there would be no us. How dull
that would be, the hardier insects moping about

without our drama, limp and uninspired, no religion
or politics to stir the blood. Convenient

that we have this creator latent in us
erratic, poised to start a burn