Hebridean Christmas Tree - Peter Isaacson

PoetryLonglist

1 May

Long-listed written pieces of 250 words or under submitted to the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition on the theme of “trees close to you”

What is this striated wooden giant,

Broken branches hanging with seaweed and plastic,

Trunk bored through and through by shipworms,

Sharp chiselling Teredos?

Normally speaking this would be a dead whale,

We have dead whales.

We don’t have trees.

Trees cannot withstand our withering salty blast.

Like us they can cower briefly behind a wall

But they cry themselves to death, corroding half an inch above the cover.

Nothing thrives outside June and July here;

By August the sea and the winter wind grind back in again.

And now it is Christmas,

Yule; the season where we are trying to believe in

Hope, the message of the evergreen.

But here it lies, Pinus contorta says my phone,

Uprooted by rude force and cast adrift to drown

And cross the Atlantic.

Somewhere out there is a land of wonder.

Where trees come from.

Peter Isaacson is a fencing contractor and estate worker who lives in the Inner Hebrides.

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