Trees...

Trees - Spinney, Dieback, Veteran, Catkins 

Spinney

When I was a child there was a chestnut.

Her candles blazed all May long, giving way

To tawny rubies casked in spiky green,

Her low-arced branches luring me to climb

And to conquer.

Later it was a beech tree I loved best.

My auntie had one growing by her gate.

Though it had many shapely arms, she called it

Venus de Milo for her voluptuous torso

And sheeny skin.

Next came a birch, slender silver 

Barred with elegant black, bronze too 

at her wrists, yet tough as tundra, 

And in season a shimmer of shivering, 

defiant gold.

There were many more saplings for my spinney,

Hornbeams and hollies, lissom willows,

Doomed tragedies of elm and ash,

Even a few prickly conifers, and then

There was rowan…

But now I’ve acquired some warts and wrinkles,

Scars and crags, and I’m drawn to you, the oak.

Deepest rooting, widest spreading, you’ve seen off 

The scourings of many a grey winter

and got the marks.

Yet still there stands a thorn, a little apart,

In jagged outline on a darkened hill

With spines like daggers in the hands and heart

And a crown of scarlet berries shining till

I yield my will.

Dieback

I cannot see an ash tree

Without searching its fingertips

For the first stains.

Life slips away by inches

Leaf to twig to limb, then

Rotting to heart and root.

For I remember the chestnuts

Before canker spread and seared

Them to an autumn in June.

And I dread the coming of

Winter that devours all.

And I remember the elms

Striding, towering, crowning,

Gone.

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.

Catkins

Drifting through these songless woods

Like late bedraggled butterflies

Leaves flutter in a dismal winter wind.

Puddles are dancing wetly 

To a rhythmless rain

And February feels forever…

But now my steps go squelching

Through a hazel grove – catkins!

Dusty fingers feeling for the Spring

Make golden notes upon a silver stave

That spell for the mind attuned a tinkling song

Inaudible except to the imagination

But soon will swell, descanted, bassed 

And multiplied into fortissimo –

And I aim to be dancing when it comes.