The Tree Surgeon

I have just been going through some of the work I submitted for uni & thought what a shame it’s just going to sit there in that little blue file! I have finished the Creative Writing elements of my degree now so I thought why not share here in my safe space. Here I had to write a poem totalling 40 lines.

The Tree Surgeon

 

Huge elm, with rifted trunk all notched and scarred,

Like to a warrior’s destiny! (Clare, ‘The Shepherd’s Tree’)

 

Deeper, swallowed by the woods

Instruments clutched in hand

Protestors riot

to backhanded ears

‘save this sacred land’

 

A single leaf sails through the air

Resting with barely a rustle. All have fallen

Like Teutoburg centurions; a mass grave of

Crimson and gold

 

I walk over the dead

 

Leaves crunch, bones crush

Centuries old he stands, stripped

Before me, skin wrinkled and scarred

Even in the face of death, he is life

Personified

 

Bearding moss lines pockets

Of bats, birds and bees

A hotel of homeless shelters

A thriving bio diverse city

A swiss-army tree

 

Decay is life

For the death-watch, rhino and stag

Chanterelle guards stand at the roots

Holding up perfect beetle bumbershoots

 

Blood races

A thousand arteries

Clogged capillaries

Oxygenate the sky

 

But why?

Man no longer cares for the treaty

That once was

 

Passive pollution

Fuels violent asphyxiation

Ivy vines let go

As they collapse

 

Under the canopy

A mosaic of sky

In pieces

 

My instruments play, to the sounds of no birdsong

As limbs are hacked

To death

 

I’m going to add my commentary here, I feel it helps to gain a deeper understanding of what the writer is thinking. Plus, if you are on a Creative Writing course it may help.

As I walk the dogs daily through local woodland areas and I am always fascinated by the trees; the shapes they take, the changes during the season and my sadness when they are destroyed to build more homes, therefore, trees became my inspiration. The first poet that came to mind is John Clare (1793-1864) and his sentence helped set the tone of my poem (as well as his personal life story). I began to note down various words and phrases that came to mind when walking, breathing, touching and smelling out in woodland areas.  I began to look at finer details and the comparisons I could make, such as the vines wrapped around the trees looking like veins and the similarities between the words. I wanted to reflect how natural it is to humanise the tree and show that the tree is far greater at being a good person to the earth than the man himself.

I had written many notes and felt I needed them all visually displayed in front of me, so I took a large sheet of paper and drew a large tree and added notes to the appropriate areas and used branches for new subjects. From this large sheet I set to writing a first draft, incorporating a few of the ideas and words that grabbed my attention. I redrafted the poem daily helping to incorporate my different ideas and moods. The first few days I used my picture to swap ideas and words, until I was happy with the theme and the message I wanted to portray. I had become much more conscious about the imagery I wanted to capture whilst walking, that inspired me with new words or edits.

After ten days, redrafting became editing, with smaller changes being made that focused on the shape and rhythm of the poem. Reading out loud gave me a truer sense of what the reader would experience, I focused to enhance the experience with enjambment to enable the reader to have to do little work to read it in the way that it is intended. A few rhymes had come naturally during the drafting stage, placed in certain areas I feel they help to gel the poem together and keep a steady rhythm flowing.  I looked at the syllables to see if there was a pattern and if it was worth manipulating any verses to help the pattern recur, but I did not feel there was anything to go on. However, there is a pattern in the stanzas as the tree gets closer to death, the stanzas shorten, furthermore, the lines become dizzier, shorter and speedier after the ‘blood races’, this is to add a burst of panic and intensity, that is visual as much as it is audible. Line 8 troubled me the most, I felt the crimson and gold armour of the roman centurions was a great way to describe the colours and the losing battle as the romans did in Teutoberg forest, I played with the idea of using like but felt it added another dimension as metaphor. Teutoberg possibly would have been aided with a footnote, but I did not want to cut another line and felt there is no harm in the reader doing a little research.