Elms
I mourn the English elms – the great swaying height,
their crowns waving on the horizon,
the reach of branches marking a field’s edge
or commanding the turn of a Suffolk lane.
Do I?
Do I mourn the species of a tree?
Samuel Johnson, in his smoke-filled tavern,
would have sensed cant,
the sanctimonious, self-righteous expression.
I regret a childhood memory and can’t
erase it from my mind. I used to watch
a group of elms from my bedroom window,
the rooks sailing out from precarious nests.
Perhaps even then the trees were sick,
the bark beetles drilling the fungus in.
Spare and sparse is what we admire in art
but not how we wish our lives to be,
eschewing a minimalist landscape;
richness is what we yearn for, crave for.
Centuries of elms are out and finished
as though they never existed.
Our worries are taking centre stage
as politicians defensively discuss
climate change. Last winter
storms cut South Uist in two.
Page(s) 27
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