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Mount Saint Helen's Ten Years After
For fifty miles along a narrow black-top road
Old growth timber -- hundreds of years old cedar and
White pine -- alternates with new planted among huge
Stumps of trees logged off thirty fifty years ago
Then, hundreds of acres of trees snapped
Off at the middle and tossed jackstraws between
Still standing trees with huge bare patches
Bones exposed by the blast
Young alder and pine struggle through ash
Eight and a half miles from the side of the
Mountain that blew out at 8:32 May 18 1980
A sign says The blast reached this site in
Less than three seconds 350 miles per hour
400 degrees F
Here trees lie for miles -- thousands of them
All snapped off at the base
All lined up neatly pointing uphill
All bare branchless and stripped of bark
The blast hit so hard and so hot needles
Branches leaves bark insects snakes chipmunks
Redwing blackbird crow and raven deer
Were incinerated even as the air's oxygen
Exploded so that fire could not follow
Spirit Lake was blasted eight hundred feet up the
Hill side to wash hot dead bodies of trees
Down deeply mudded slopes where five seconds
Before had been voluptuous forest Harry Truman his
Harmony Lodge and where ten years later their still
Colorless mass paves the south third of the lake
Greywhite and blue greywhite and blue
Logs water hillsides sky
There was no place to sit down as
The cold wind in the pale morning light
Sucked the wind out of me
Heywood Williams.........................June 27, 1990
