For Sarah Alyn Stacey
(After Pierre de Ronsard’s Elegy XXIV, ‘Escoute, Bucheron, arreste un peu le bras …’, occasioned by the felling of the poet’s beloved forest of Gastine in 1573.)
Why destroy me, I’ve done you no harm. You call this progress; we call it a crime, a cycle lane. Message affixed to an old oak tree in Ballyraine, Letterkenny, cut down in 2024 despite a petition of almost 1,600 signatures.
‘Stop – assassin! Drop your axe! It’s no dead thing – this oak you’re cutting With such insouciance; it’s not sap That’s oozing from its wounds, but The lifeblood of the spirit of the tree – The nymph you want to terminate. You kill a tree, you kill divinity – And if you can be jailed for stealing grapes What sentence do you think you’ll get For murdering a daimon? Six months for a satyr, or a dryad? No. Eternal damnation.
And you, my dear Gastine, the bastion Of rooks, your paths will bear the prints of deer No longer, nor your branches toss And shimmer emerald in the summer. Lovers who seek your shade and birdsong To laugh, hold hands and kiss Will wonder where in hell you’ve gone And stare dumbfounded at your absence: A levelled site deprived of echoes, A plain ravaged by coulter, plough. Deterred by noise and lack of shadows Pan and the Satyrs will abandon you. Pilgrims hot and footsore from the roads And dreaming of your cool oasis Will find a wasteland, a stumpy void, Farewell dear trees – I still recall And they will curse your murderers.
The times when Zephyr swerved between you And Apollo would inspire me to scrawl My poems: I’d settle down and pray For Calliope or another Muse To turn my thorny words to roses. Now all I have are memories Of dryad music floating over moss. Dear oaks – whom Zeus inhabited For his prophetic whispers at Dodona – You’ve given acorns for our daily bread, And we return your gift with murder. Lucretius says whatever lives will die And change to something else – Hills to plains, mountains to valleys, The ocean into meadows: Form might change, but not matter. I say: this process might be grooved in law But that’s no reason not to mourn the clatter Of every oak, and weep at its slaughter.
