Open Secrets - Peter Isaacson
One of the Top 40 submissions in our 2023 Urban Tree Festival writing competition.
Open Secrets
“Trees aren’t in general a secretive bunch by nature,
They don’t so much spy on us
As reflect our shortcomings back upon us.
Look to the uplands and highlands;
That greenish blue army of uphill marching clones,
A fenced off monoculture crop sold to us by the lackeys of money grubbers
As ‘forestry’
Is simply depletion
Written large in a bird’s eye.
That London city Plane tree
“My word, a huge specimen!”
Overfed on the exhausted, carbon dioxide heavy ‘Old Smoke’ air.
Those last remaining Caledonian pines,
Black on mauve and
Stranded over the nearest two horizons,
Too far out to fetch down
For Nelson’s cannons.”
Peter Isaacson
Peter Isaacson is an increasingly lazy person who hides in the Inner Hebrides where he tinkers with (and quite often breaks) stuff.