It was war
and the giants fell
despatched by a scadgett,
take this coupe and make of it
a timber soup says the Forestry,
so a yellow machine
with a saw and a claw
tracks its way to 41A,
and the man inside
with a job and a plan
cuts the elders and shoves them,
they’re pushovers,
claws them into a pile,
the ‘log landing’.

Then the leaves leave
the birds go
the arborial mammals scatter
and what was it I heard last night
from the snugness of my tent?
voice high in a tree,
a faint reply further out,
all these creatures go
but where is their refuge?

Horizontal now, the Tarkine giants
are a bleaching cracking abandoned
tumble jumble,
with a rubbish pile of bones high at the back,
in the middle of a forest where few set foot,
not since it was called “takayna”.

Are we the last to have Tarkined here
shouting as we swam in the freezing Frankland River,
skipping stones or glimpsing
a brook trout flee across
the shallow pebble bed?
the last to watch the wedge-tailed eagles
soar above a pebble picnic
where we drank cocoa
and fed out souls
through our very pores?

*FR 41A & B are the names of the coupes that were due to be logged

This is an excerpt from ‘Trees’ – the Autumn/Winter edition 2017 of our Mind Moon Circle journal