Scots Pine
Among such elders
gratitude, a lifetime deep.
The crumbly crackling needle-bed:
a welcome to lay down
to see and be seen.
The sky is a long way up
a plane drones by.
They look down, like wise old women.
Their resinous fragrance
spreads through and through
touching the ground
why do I forget this
****
Silver Birch
As you walk in the dusk
through winter
the white trunks are gleaming.
Like poems.
Mooring posts in the dark ocean.
At the touch of March,
with that first ripple,
they break into leaf.
Young ones spindly,
bark crinkling like children’s knees,
ageing into blisters and scabs.
After each clear-cut
they return
through the wreckage.
Green turning silver
in a shower of leaves.
Spring's true note
pitch-perfect.
****
Ash
Beside the bridge
where my path crosses the stream –
ash.
The tree for crossroads.
The leaves are like
the feathers of some huge eagle.
Roots bind and suck,
fibres pump, leaves feed on light —
life forming an axis of presence.
Around it a widening orbit:
worlds forming, eager for flight.
****
Beech
Scrambling downhill
through bracken and brambles,
I'm getting more complicated.
Plans and people.
In the mud, at Moorhouse Lane,
the beeches stop me.
A line of them,
strong, statuesque, nude.
Further along, there's another,
roots wrestling the soil.
The light soaks their leaves,
the broad horizontal fans that,
as this year grows colder,
will burn red-gold.
While what remains
struggles with time and things and certainties,
grey as weathered statesmen.
****
Oak
The weight-bearer, arms straight out.
Blunt as a countryman's tongue.
Boughs splinter, tear off.
It doesn't matter.
Gashed to the heart
it keeps going.
Fists at the branch tips.
A wild scattering of acorns.
Food and shelter
for every snuffling and chirping thing.
It holds – the backbone.
****
Rowan
The dangle of berries
clumps of them, unripe,
fattening for autumn.
The passion of fruit
to flesh into red;
its merciless surge,
its birth-lust.
To swell and be eaten.
To be stripped down to seed.
The earth holds my feet
and the sun wraps my neck.
Waves, floods; thought goes under.
Let sap storm; let scarlet.
Summer is rape, a burn-out;
but the rapture that hooks me is green.
****
Holly
Tough and glossy,
the fine-honed leaf
arches in the curl of my hand.
A silk-skinned prickle,
a scorpion ready to strike.
The berries are blood-gems.
King of winter,
of the bone-cold:
enter, piercing the heart
with the truth about flesh;
about the evergreen outreach –
hold me, hold me .
Its glowing crown
is nailed to the door.
****
Yew
Yew has its own season.
We enter there briefly.
At the turn of the year —
the point between this world and the next —
we burn logs and drink,
and sing of what was and might yet be.
The yew has one time only —
the darkly green present.
Rooted in death,
this tree will stand in this world
while a thousand years rage
and our bodies flare,
smoulder, and go out –
while the yew holds its gate open.
****
Elms at Night
At night
the woodland doesn't sleep.
It breathes in,
drinking the milk of moonlight.
Bracken shudders, the leaf-carpet
rustles; the wild ones call and cry.
A dark shape shuffles;
there's a brief shining eye.
Then at dawn, the out-breath: a haze of colours.
Woodland knows and lives its body.
Elms growing straight,
through death after death.
As their disease clusters round them,
they're clear.
****
Lime at the Edge of the Woodland
Here, within this canopy,
behind the lime-tree's waterfall,
there's room to be.
Quiet and cool,
enough for a seeing;
an outlook, a view
through the leaf curtain
at all of us:
people, going in and out of doors.
Our lives.
Strangers,
estranged from true strangeness
reaching out, bustling past
this living stupa.
It’s lost to recognition.
The great trees are unseen.
This is how, one eye on the clock,
Death begins his rounds.
****