Progress is a word that usually arrives with applause, and J. Patrick Byrne's poem of that title lets it in as a trespasser. In three short stanzas, a quiet street with its trees is invaded by "loud strange men" who run wire through it, and the cost of that intrusion is measured not in money or inconvenience but in damage to living things. The title, then, is quietly ironic: by the end we are invited to ask who exactly is being served, and at what price.
The poem is built as a small story with a clear before, during and after. The first stanza establishes the world that is about to be disturbed. The trees are "gracious", a word more often applied to a hostess than to a plant, and it makes them courteous presences on the street rather than scenery. Their "feathery limbs" droop softly, and the leaves "whispered tiny hymns / In summer's rain and heat." Hymns are sung in worship, so the leaves become a congregation, and the street becomes something close to a sacred space, constant through both rain and heat. Nothing in this stanza is in a hurry.
The second stanza introduces the intruders, and Byrne changes the sound of the verse to match. The men are "loud" and "strange", and they bring "coils of wire / And posts of foreign wood." The word "foreign" is worth pausing on. The posts are wood, just like the trees, but they are wood cut off from its source, dead timber from elsewhere. Even the material is a kind of insult. The wind, meanwhile, becomes the choirmaster of the leaves: "each leaf in his choir, / Tiptoe, listening, stood." The image of the whole choir standing on tiptoe, holding its breath, is wonderfully tense. It captures the instinct of the vulnerable to go quiet when something unfamiliar and noisy turns up.
The third stanza delivers the blow, and it does so with remarkable restraint. The men simply "went their way", with no villainous speech and no gloating. Then comes the wind's response: "The breeze / Mourned, and the leaves mourned too." The word "mourned" suggests a death, and the final lines explain why: "Holes had been hacked in all the trees / To let the wire go through." The verb "hacked" is the harshest word in the poem. It is a rough, careless, chopping word, set against the soft vocabulary of "feathery" and "whispered". Notice also that the holes are cut "to let the wire go through", a purpose clause so matter-of-fact that it makes the damage seem even more casual. Nobody thought twice. The convenience of the wire outweighed the integrity of the trees.
The form supports this contrast. Each stanza is a quatrain rhyming on alternate lines (ABAB or, in the second stanza, wire/wood/choir/stood), and the lines are short and lightly stressed, giving the whole poem the lilt of a nursery rhyme or a simple hymn. That gentle music is itself part of the argument: the poem sounds like the world it mourns, small, tuneful and easily broken. The shift from long, flowing vowels in the opening stanza ("gracious", "drooped", "feathery") to the harder consonants of "coils", "posts" and "hacked" lets us hear the invasion happen. And the final rhyme, "trees" with "through", ends on the very thing the poem objects to: the wire passing through the wounded wood.
What makes the poem significant is how much it achieves with so little. Byrne never lectures about technology or nature, and he never uses the word "damage". He lets personification do the work, giving trees and wind feelings and voices until we cannot help siding with them. The poem leaves us with an uncomfortable question that outlasts its subject: when we are told that something is progress, whose silence are we not hearing?