1
My limbs no longer weave and sway,
speaking to the wind.
My leaves no longer glitter and dance,
mingling joyously with the rays of the sun.
I am meant to bend and curve with grace in countless ways,
suited to the endless anarchy of Nature’s laws.
I can grow, and flower, and colour with the season’s changes.
I can blend with my neighbours – sweet, soft moss and curling shrubs.
But now I am tied to vertical shafts of unfeeling iron;
caught in their infernal embrace by rusted brackets and bolts.
I don’t move.
I don’t speak.
I don’t feel any more.
I have no language for my cruel confinement,
no way of speaking and sharing my pain.
So please unshackle me;
please bury me in the soil’s black juices.
Please stand me in plain air
and say that you care.
2
I am your captor, my arboreal friend,
so unwillingly imprisoned in my metallic embrace.
You plead to be free of my intimate support;
yet I have protected you from perils unknown.
When they come to loosen your throngs
and place you at last in the ‘plain air’ that you yearn,
have you thought what prospect faces me?
With our alliance cut short
I become a mere collection of redundant rods,
lest connected again with one more of your kind.
You will grow and thicken, and complicate your strength,
with searching roots and ever-extending boughs,
ready to confront whatever tempest Nature disposes.
And my iron will lie rusting there, in the grass,
Mission completed - purpose forgotten.
Written to record the predicament of a newly-acquired Cornus Milky Way, secured temporarily to scaffolding.