Once I was a tree - Julian Bishop
One of the Top 40 submissions in our 2023 Urban Tree Festival writing competition.
Once I was a tree
shucking off my dirty husk, springing up
impulsive as a back-garden ash-plant,
sapling burgeoning from a cracked path
or a self-sown oak on the Common, wild
and ferocious, the music of growing
all of my own.
Instead, you coddled me
in a peat-free growing medium, inbibition
calibrated to an optimum moisture range,
cotyledons kept misted, stem perfectly
perpendicular to qualify for an Avenue
Creation Exercise.
Then you stepped up
protection, two stakes to keep me in place,
chicken-wired and Q-coded for fortification.
My roots clutch at the aggregates of life,
rubber crumb topping a solid finish for
pedestrian traffic.
I’m grateful but it’s left me
unhuggable, half-way between hearth
and gutter, green infrastructure, with a tube
to keep me watered. Too tall and the axe
falls when I’m deemed to be a potential
public hazard,
my aging limbs laborious
to maintain. When the traffic noise dies,
the wind is indistinguishable from a sigh.
Julian Bishop
Julian Bishop’s first collection of eco poems called We Saw It All Happen was published earlier this year by Fly On The Wall Press.