The Gap by Scott Tyrrell
With headlines filled again with the act of mindless vandalism which robbed the Northumberland landscape of a true natural treasure, we thought it was a good time to re-publish Scott Tyrrell's poem
It was just a tree
What’s one more tree felled?
When people struggle
to survive and grow
in fallow earth
that birth and circumstance
planted them in
When lives are cut down and torn
And we scorn the pitiless pruning
ruining communities
that wither and die at the stem
How could I compare thee to a tree?
A tree nestled in a hill’s dip
A hike and a trip from anywhere
A single sycamore in a sea of
pasture and stones whilst drones
overhead captured beauty
only imagined by an artist’s line -
A shrine to painters and shutterbugs
But still just a tree
with its brothers and sisters long-gone
Moved on by centuries of storms
and culls and disease until only it remained
Trained to guard an ancient wall,
that’s all
Just a tree keeping its
timelapse eye on the world
whilst herds and birds
and fights and rites
and cattle and battle
and tractors and actors
and flings and wedding rings
all sped by like lightning.
Just a tree that looked like the land
had surrendered to it
That the hills had made way for it
Like it had somehow dropped from the sky
and the earth had bent to cushion its fall
A tree that stood like a dandelion
pinched in the Earth’s fingers
poised to make a wish
for travellers to come home.
A tree that smite and spite
swiped from its post one September night
A tree pointlessly cut dead
that bled across a world
that unfurled paintings,
poems, songs, sculptures
and snaps to fill the gap
left by a loss that crossed
communities with eulogies
to the reflection that we all share –
That life is brief
and grief is as deep
as the roots of a sycamore
That just wants to grow again.
Copyright: Scott Tyrrell