Veteran

 

In the centuries since your acorn

First thumped into loam

What rings have rippled through you.

There’s one for 1966 – four-two!

There’s another for the year I was born.

There’s a ring for the Messerschmitt that buzzed you.

Here’s one for the death of Queen Victoria

And another for her birth – and surely

there must be one for Royal Charles

hiding from the Roundheads,

As in most of the oaks in England.

Perhaps six hundred times

A green tide has flowed over you

And a brown tide ebbed.

Your long roots have battled droughts,

Your branches wrestled storms.

Several tons, maybe, of small grey birds

Have pecked hopefully along your scars and fissures

And flown away, and fallen to the ground.

How rapidly I cast my eye

Over your unanxious vastness

And hastily enumerate and imagine

And hurry off after my own rootless life.