Ash
What strikes me about this tree is its fearsome shape:
the solid jetpack of its trunk shooting up
into a swollen cupola of foliage:
you would not have to search for long
in the quiet libraries of collective consciousness
before you were to find a similar image
burned into the psychic retinas of a generation,
a shape instantly recognisable
from its starring role in the newsreels
that even now, decades later,
still play in black and white
before your nightmares.
Here, however – in the soft, molten glow
of a summer evening, it has grown
into something else: reclaimed from the ashes
by the Earth, its silhouette breathes
endurance – regeneration – birth.
It is as though some improbable pacifist government
has gathered together its best evolutionary physicists
to test a wholly new kind of bomb: one that ignites
in a slow-motion explosion of photosynthesis,
a lush mushroom-cloud of evergreen.
