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,
And they will curse your murderers.
Farewell dear trees – I still recall
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.
