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Replanting The Great Caledonian Forest
In those days, Scots Pines lawned the Highlands
The Mesolithic Marten that ran through the branches
Could see both seas and never leave the touching leaves
Of giant cathedralling trees, shepherding their green,
Endless, restless hush, that rustled with death and life
With only island peaks visible above the flood
The Cairngorm Archipelago, the Cuillin Ridge Atoll
Until, in that first great clearance of the land,
By axe and ovine tooth, numberless trees fell one by one
Strewn like jackstraws, the devil playing at dominoes
Not that the mountains noticed the denudation
To them all living things are just fluff and dust
Titanic, elemental, their minds on bigger matters,
They grind each other's gradients, clash with the clouds,
Try to overtower the moon and pierce the sun
But sitting here on Sgurr an Airgid
I think that it's a shame all those trees are gone
And that it's time something was done
So I finish my apple and hurl the core,
Packed with its seeds, onto some fertile ground
And think to myself
That at least it's begun
In The Peak Forest
Sunlit, rambling, through tall creaking beeches
The old forest dreams of ancient wild-wood
Knotty undergrowth, brambling, that tries to recapture
The soft, mossy paths of leaf-learned mud
And we push through bushes and leaves lick our faces
There is bird-song, dappling and the saplings of spring
And each step reveals, glimpsed between tree-trunks
Another secret glade of the old woodland King
And the land is a tangle of ley lines and lanes
Hedgerows, roads, bye-ways, bridle-paths, streams
And dry-stone walls green verdigris glowing
Thinking of earth in their dim stony dreams
And hawthorns are the spirits of warlocks and witches
Who, cursed, writhe wooden anguish and spite
With ancient-bark skin, like licheny lycanthropy
And spikes that prickle, awaiting the night
And strewn giant stones henge all around us
Monolithic dice of gods with lost names
Whose giant bones lie entombed underneath now
Awaiting the call to return to their games
And hill-top copses are the havens of ravens
Who curse cultivation with primitive croaks
Wood, crow castles - encircled and shadowed
Where time drifts entangled amid cryptic oaks
And the old land glows its mystical soul
Hazy silk light the loving gaze of Gaia
Up gilded slopes the path leads us on now
Deeper into wood, and higher and higher
The Botany Of The British Isles
Tangled tendrils tie green knots through
Silver cobwebs sewn entwined in
Mistletoe vines that beguile the eye
With cursive strokes of woven briar
Curve in alder wild-wood mazement
Twisted torcs plait wands of hazel
Spell out the words of elder scription
Cast warding runes and Ogham curses
Roots rewrite first sandstone scratches
Recarve the glyphs of primal Sanskrit
Ferns unfurl their figureheads
Stretch fishbone fronds caulked with spores
The keels and ribs of Dragonships, their
Proud prows keen for the calling sun
Lodestone-pulled, raven-serenaded
Blown across the bluebell sea
The tang and crash of waves uncharted
That surge and clash the dappled beach
Hands fanned in glory at the evening star
Splayed palms wave in prayer to Thor
Drops of blood besplashed on bushes
Scarlet of silk of fire of sand
Opium-poppy, rhododendron
The spray from empire massacres
Summer bushes burn as farmsteads
Pop gunshot fuschia bud fusillades
Rose red the sun on quiet aftermaths
Long scars let into mosquito lands
Berries the pricks from needle nicks
Posion pill revenge of the Hashshashin
Astray from ancient plains of Asia
Tectonic knights astride the earth
Or carried by pagan olive legions
To root this ground and pillar these woods
Rise as spines and ribs of Titans
Hauled up Chinese dragon bones
That scatter leaves in reenacting
The panicked tracks of dinosaurs
Or brown-skinned oaks or redwood pines
Seedlings of trees of Pangaea
Red Kite
Winding high and soars and glides
Holding the air in potter’s wings
Writes curlicue script on an empty sky
A warning of an imminent death
Feathers fanned tail to rudder the flight
Then wings drawn in like a thrown knife
A flash of eyes and eager claws
And ruddy feathers blood a final breath
Standing Stones
Not the wind to worry the stones
Nor the passing shadows of crows
Casting brief cave-paintings there
Not the gazes of women and men
Nor, then,
The gazes of their great, great, great, great grandchildren
Only the years
Flake away by layers of dust
Peel back the skin, in search of the meaning
But the obelisks, obdurate
Remain silent, disdainful
Keeping their long purposes to themselves
During the Fall
The air is woodsmoke, cobwebs and cold
The sun breathing light through leaves of ochre
Diamond-dust scattered onto bright, white frost
That has the forest floor caught in alabaster
Whilst four last crows flap through ice
Ragged arrow of black against the dying gray
Fleeing the cold that closes around them
The last living things in all of creation
We crunch through fermenting leaf-mould mulch
Kick chestnut nuggets polished to teak
Catch the leaves that rain down around us
That count all the colours of the cosmos
Chocolate moss soot honey lime bone blood
They dance and play around our feet
Forest-spirits gamboling gleeful games
In the ticker-tape parade given by the trees
A billion butterflies dying in bliss
From their perches upon the skeletal twigs
Of deer-antler oaks where rooks curse and croak
A drizzling mist drifts out of the ground
Washing the world to bleakness and gray
The exhaled ghosts of earlier autumns
Long-lost memories of forgotten days
When the Medieval poor shivered through snow
And Celts stalked mammoths across the land
On a day that is fading into tea-time gloom
And all that once moved falls into decay
Whilst old, old whispers in the bright, cold air
After the lazy, complacence of summer days
Tell us not that everything living must die
But how precious and precarious is that life
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