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“Why would anyone cut down a tree that brought joy to so many?”
Guardian Newspaper headline, 15 July 2025
Feala iċ on þām beorge ġebiden hæbbe
wrāðra wyrda… sceadu forðēode
wann under wolcnum.
[Many on yonder hill a grievous fate I bore…
Darkness under the clouds spread out before.]
— The Dream of the Rood
“The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active.”
– William James
“…even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been
…
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Binsey Poplars
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-less is the suffix they tend to like to use
to categorize our act. Mindless, thoughtless, and senseless.
All that and more, we guess. Less was the point.
One less tree on a landscape
stripped (by us humans) of trees so many years ago.
Yet this is more. Something unique
removed forever from the world,
downed execution style.
An act of arboricide.
Brazen and yet banal.
The evil buzz of the chainsaw
blade and then a roundhead thud.
The trunk toppled on top of some old wall,
hurting a bit of harmless useless heritage.
And seeds are shed and flutter all around
twirling to earth on little helicopters.
*
Folk saddened
demand revenge. And justice done.
Legless, we plead.
Baseless, a justice decreed.
Treeless the sun sets on a windless plain today.
Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash
Poetry, Politics and Language 