Volcano Girls

As we drew near to the mountain, the eerie ghostly vision appeared.
Felt like death had camped out on the hillsides.
The tree trunks - beheaded- rooted in the hills along 504.
The graveyards of a reigning lush forest littered the road to the great mountain.
The remaining tree trunks stand like tombstones, mourning a violent death 25 years ago.
The volcano still erupts in the distance, slowing seeping an intense vapor that can melt an airplane.

Who mourns this death? Who brings flowers for the ashen-grey gravestones?
The tourists? The locals?
Only Mother Nature?
Are they ignoring the sights along the highway - too focused on the volcano ahead?
Mount St. Helens protudes into the radiant sky in the horizon.
I mourn this forest's vegetative demise.
I see the scattered pillars of timber as they lie limp - lifeless.
Tossed like toothpicks on the hills for miles in all directions.
An enormous mass grave where the deceased were hurled by the volcanic blast.
Did the ranger say velocities of 150mph?
The eulogies were delivered years ago
but I still hear nature weeping
among the rebirth of the new generation of vegetation.
The volcano is also rebuilding - expanding its lava dome since the eruption of 1980.
The cycle of life and death continues along the 504.
The rigor mortis is over.
Life is infiltrating the landscape again.