ANDREW Young, the Elgin-born poet and cleric, wrote with perception and originality about the natural world in its many manifestations. Here, he talks to trees, not aloud but in an inner monologue. The two pieces come from his Selected Poems (Carcanet, £9.95).
THE TREE
Tree, lend me this root,
That I may sit here at your foot
And watch these hawking flies that wheel
And perch on the air’s hand
And red-thighed bees
That fan the dust with their wings’ breeze.
Do you not feel me on your heel,
My bone against your bone?
Or are you in such slumber sunk,
Woodpeckers knocking at your trunk
Find you are not at home?
To winds you are not dumb;
Then tell me, if you understand:
When your thick timber has been hewn,
Its boards in floors and fences sewn,
And you no more a tree,
Where will your dryad be?
THE FALLEN TREE
The shade once swept about your boughs
Quietly obsequious
To the time-keeping sun;
Now, a fallen tree, you with that shade are one.
From chalky earth as white as surf
Beneath the uptorn turf
Roots hang in empty space
Like snakes about the pale Medusa’s face.
And as I perch on a forked branch,
More used to squirrel’s haunch,
I think how dead you are,
More dead than upright post or fence or chair.
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