I was driving along on holiday when I saw these trees and how the logging had scarred the landscape without apparent concern about its impact on the environment. I felt the landscape’s pain and tried to convey some of its raw emotion.
This was first published by Red Penguin Press in Words for the Earth – Poetry Project Environmentally Conscious Poetry in January 2022
Tree cemetery, desolate and grey
shorn stumps weeping sap and
tooth pick branches, sticking up or snapped.
Death camps of bald stumps,
cut and left to bleed in a ravaged land.
Rising stark and alone,
isolated scattered single trees
bereft and lost, midst snapped off branches, raising high
arrowing upward, piercing the sky.
The land a war-torn landscape
as logging machines scream and hiss
tearing the forest unable to resist.
Earth’s lungs torn into shreds
to fulfil mans greed as woody dryads
weep and die, and trees no longer breach the sky.
