28/08/2018

Restless


When we came to allocate the fields
Only those trees that fitted into our small horizons stayed
The survivors became natures arbiters
Straddling the newly pastoral and a mythic world now gone
Traces left in gnarled bark and the whisper of leaves
Their lives prolonged by pollarding hand after hand after hand
Somewhere down the line hands were washed
Our connection further strained
Hedgerows no longer tended did not stay tame
Giving themselves in decay to the earth

Making fertile the soil, ground primed

the veterans remain

As wildness begins to reign we concrete over

Then desire a lawn
So buy fertiliser
Ship nourishment in from Russia, the US or Israel
Ever shaping the land
Restlessness the only story