Split by Lue Mac

It’s hard to comprehend the space

left by a tree. I picture my brother

waking to find the green face of the street

in Plymouth split like punched front teeth.

Later, he sends a message on the chat:

I don’t get how they’re gone. It happens

just like that, the long list of living names,

the birch, blue cedar, cherry, cockspur thorn,

the norway maple to the sycamore - and each

a fodder for the pile. Death is a one-way street

lined with shuttered houses, not a leaf in sight,

which opens on an empty motorway, cut

between dismembered, darkened fields. I wake

to read a boy has, in the night, taken a chainsaw

to the ancient sycamore on Hadrian’s wall.

Sixteen, they said. A bark-chink fraction of the life

he took. No reason given, but you can guess

at the dumb rage that drove the boy’s hand

to the heart of the wood and onwards.

So have I, many times, passed through the very

middle of what I needed, chasing the pale fires

that bluster briefly when a bridge is burned.

________

Lue Mac (they/them) is a queer, rural writer from the South-West of England. Murmurations, a collaboration with the photographer Billy Barraclough, was published by Besides Press in 2021, and their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma, Clarion Poetry, Impossible Archetype and elsewhere. They write about mental illness, weird nature, and the compulsions of joy.