Poem of Anger, Sadness and Frustration at the Destruction of Trees Along the Toodyay-Perth Road

Tyrant Spells in Excessive Heat Sees Old Trees Uprooted Alongside Toodyay-Perth Road as the Biosphere Collapses In a Heap to be Mulched (Seeds Collected for Later Resowing in the Spirit Of...) in The Name of Safety

            ‘But a tyrant spell has bound me, 

            And I cannot, cannot go. 

            The giant trees are bending’ 

                        Emily Brontë

These trees I see now on this surveyed zone

are not ours per se, but we have responsibility

under the tyranny. Even if we plant

a seed and it grows to sapling and tree

we do not own the growth or even

the tree’s body when it deceases.

And so the local naturalist club does

a deal with government tree-killers incorporated —

‘give some up to save some’ — and ‘stakeholders’

who are informed make their cases and seeds

are collected and deep-seated flooded gums

are tumbled. Offsets. In the jaws of the embodied

hologram of an arcade claw machine transmigrated

to do its coin-feeders’ bidding, always responding

where aimed and succeeding in grabbing the killed trees’

fluffy ‘all the same’ canopy and dropping down

the mulcher’s gullet — steel-capped grin. The personal agony

of failed protest before protest can even happen aside —

it’s on your doorstep and signed off on righteously

(road trauma is real but there are other ways of holding back

the slaughter) — vested interests tearing down life-towers,

intensive housing project for non-human life along the roadside —

and the compulsory reclamation of what’s

outside the reserve to enact the vision

of transport. Giant trees bend then are torn out

like teeth, the heavy snow of fallout in the overheating —

I cannot pass without the pain deluding

me into an acceptance of falls with machine’s

anaesthetics offering nothing more than a brief

respite from culpability — ‘the community’

having answered in all our names, Babbeled tree-talk.

Why not travel slower, speak slower? Take

curves gradually with shade against the burn?

Let life-growth show a way through office-decisions

all bravado in the field — suits mingling with work clobber

hard to get clean: break the tyrant spell, and let us all go,

go through unbreaking unbroken less excessive less overheated.

            John Kinsella