They are guzzling up the forests boys and girls, and being given trophies and enormous salaries for doing so. For annihilating and removing the kingdoms of nature at everyone’s expense without care or consideration for the generations to come. Fat bellied men and their machines, extinguishing the lights of many lanterns, and by doing so, destroying nature’s kings and queens. So they can buy more stuff to fill their homes and gardens.
Not being content and learning from history and the destruction of towns, villages and cities they now wage a further war against forests that survived this dark and tragic time. Leaving in their wake panoramas whose memories are no more, which have been obliterated and turned into slaughterhouses, where the fractured bodies and souls of royalty and their life-giving elixirs lie, dying helplessly whilst others wander fragmented and aimlessly over vast areas of shock and grief that follows right behind such an invasion. From natural landscapes to manufactured ones. Untamed regions that can never be replaced not even after centuries.
Leaving behind a triangle of loss. A loss of bird song from the tops of trees which has been eradicated from the area and thus replaced by a giant, silent empty space that resembles a large gaping hole in their universe. And, further loss for the reindeer and moose that ran for their lives as their minds and hearts were drowning but not in water. No, in tides of grief that have fallen from dying trees, and the third loss concerns the people in nearby towns and cities, the sensitive ones who cannot eat or sleep. Whose restlessness grows because what helps sustain them in terms of a vibrant cosmos has been furthermore, reduced.
And so, like the goddess of the land, whose limbs have been wounded once more, they take to their beds hoping for re-enchantment and that someday, within someone, somewhere, it will be remembered how trees and forests love people and can become sad when they are not around.
Poem and copyright Francis Joy 2024.
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