Poetry – Trees – a poem in my Anthropocene Apocalypse series about the senselessness of deforestation.

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This short-sighted destruction of the world’s great jungles is the most wicked vandalism of all. To sell the future for a handful of gold is plain stupid.

 

Trees are our oldest living organisms. Some are three thousand, five hundred years old. There is no respect. Thousand year old trees are senselessly chopped for profit.

 

Pristine rain-forest, teeming with life, is being cleared to provide food, cosmetics and beverages for a burgeoning human population. Our numbers are destroying the world. Coffee, palm-oil and short-term slash and burn farming are destroying the world.

 

The trees provide fruit, habitats for most of our planet’s land-based life, soil consolidation, carbon recycling, oxygen production, medicines, shade and water recycling.

 

Without the trees the soil is rapidly eroded, fertility declines, the wild-life dies, the oxygen is not released, the carbon is not absorbed and all life is the less.

 

The short-term gain is soon spent. The long-term loss goes on for ever.

 

Who is to say that these incredible long-lived life-forms are not sentient? Perhaps they think and dream in their own languid manner? Perhaps they feel fear and pain? Who knows?

 

Trees

 

Green sap,

Green leaves,

Oxygen, soil, fruit and shade –

Fine rewards.

 

Slow grow,

Tall trees,

Serene giants, majestic calm

Strong and broad.

 

Chain saw,

Short sight,

Dead to lumber and away

Cash in hand.

 

Bare soil,

Stark stump,

Arid rock, no life and now

Desert sand.

 

No fruit,

No leaf,

No oxygen, water, muse

Or rich life.

 

All poor,

No breath,

No food, animal, music

Drum or fife.

 

Gentle

Life-form

Savagely ripped apart

Without a thought.

 

Seas of

Green now

Now parched joyless rock; all life

Sold and bought.

 

Opher 18.7.2015

11 thoughts on “Poetry – Trees – a poem in my Anthropocene Apocalypse series about the senselessness of deforestation.

  1. Unfortunately, we have a long history of doing this to our beautiful forests. I just finished reading The Barkskins which give the history of our abusing this natural resource and speaks to this problem.

    1. Britain used to be covered in trees from one end to the other. What sacrilege. What a loss. Thanks for commenting Bernadette.

  2. It is so sad. I hope that once people are gone, somehow the trees will live on, and become old once more. This has saddened me for a long time. Some of my best friends are trees.

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