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.
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