She sacrificed years of her youth on the ground
to perch at one hundred and fifty feet,
outlasted storms, loneliness, sickness, cold,
decisively defeated fear, learned
to draw spiritual strength directly
from the heart of a giant redwood tree.

Pacific Lumber Company money men
tried tempting her with deceptive offers,
when that failed, murderous harassment:
she resisted, for over seven hundred
days and nights did not fall, but stayed
balanced on her aerial platform.

She wept often, and prayed often, and
did not come down. Machines raged the sky
around her, fires and chainsaws menaced,
sometimes she lay in pain and delirium
high above the clear-cuts and burning
yet still did not descend from her purpose.

One must learn to be a lung breathing in smoke,
a swollen-shut eye that sees clearly,
a frostbite-blackened hand that holds on,
a voice heard over helicopter winds,
a spirit able to kick a way the scaffolding
of faith and trust the wings it supported,

one must learn these things to do what she did.