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
