Another Poem for the Slaughtered Trees on Toodyay Road (just south of Toodyay town)

Seeing an Excavator Tooth-extractor Push Over an Old-growth Wandoo

            On the Road to Perth Just South of Toodyay

Subset of incantatory praise of CAT planet-wrecking machinery —

the 50-ton excavator with range of buckets — shears groomers

grabs skeletons mud rock batter teeth — that will debranch and tear

a trunk will twist to push and rip out the old-growth wandoo

before your eyes as workaday as time sheets. Watch the headstrong

tree pushed over to tilt at planners’ windmills tumbling into gully

and reach for your mouth your maw always that bloody dental

analogy tedious as jawing and mouthing on and on so phobic and gory.

Excavator tracks knuckle by knuckle scallop by scallop levered

forward chain of command steel confrontation with tree flesh

resilience till give — root and nerve sans anaesthetic bare to the gaze

of sadists or maybe just the blithely indifferent. Cruel and clear sap bloody.

Subset of incantatory and cruel as therapy designed to get you back

to work that damages, keep you dulled to pulling and pushing,

tearing teeth from the jawing and mouthing the wordy planet —

induce an illiteracy of presence, an exclamation of pain without

vocabulary. After all, who can speak with a numbed lip anyway?

This CAT-induced literacy of being the excavator that pulls and pushes

as well as digs, this deployment of rough surgical equipment, this grooming

of planet to run roughshod and unmake syntax to realign sense.

Where is this room for finding in a subset of incantatory praise?

Surely there’s room to find a way in and back out via the gap

made by the CAT 50-ton excavator’s work ethic, its showing

the way to what will be — bloody mouth empty of tree-teeth; smiley-faced?

            John Kinsella

Destruction of Old-Growth Trees on the York-Quairading Road

This has been going on for some time, though there was a lull in the devastation over the Christmas-New Year period. The York-Quairading Road is being widened outside York, land taken from residents, and hundreds of old-growth salmon gums, wandoos and York gums being cleared.

This is part of a larger picture of Main Roads of Western Australia destroying vegetation in the 'Long Paddock'. It's happening on a massive scale, as I've articulated before.

The right-wing governments of Australia have been making a concerted effort to delete ecologies as fast as they can: land-clearing in all states is happening fast, but it is now reaching critical level.

This poem was written at the beginning of January in support of our friend Lindsay and his family, over where trees are being deleted as I write (as, sadly, they are being deleted in so many places). I am letting it loose to the world now to show we care, and to show Lindsay and the others resisting this destruction that they are not alone. We care, and we want the world to hear.

Sweeney the Barn Owl Opens His Eyes Wide in Broad Daylight

Sweeney looks down at the people coming out of the hospital —

they have seen him, he knows it in his bones. Yes, now their eyes

search his eyes and the shock of light reaches as far inside

as the flames that drove him out of the tall tree on the hillside.

Where can I rest? he asks them. The Main Roads are cutting down

all the old-growth wandoos and salmon gums and York gums,

slicing through their anniversaries with a righteousness

that will truck no argument. These living heritage buildings

we conduct our lives in and around, our places of eating and worship.

Sweeney shuts his eyes on them, high up in the gum that clings

to the edge of the car-park. Tonight he will fly south-east, aiming

to reach the great trees still remaining on the York-Quairading

Road before they are brought down, before red-tailed phascogale

and Carnaby’s black cockatoo and rainbow bee-eater are forced

to find somewhere else to feed and nest and hide from owl, or vanish —

and in the matutinal revelation that abbreviates his waking hours,

upside down in a tree-killer’s world, Sweeney will hoot at their stupidity,

a klaxon-call just before the crash that will wipe us all out.

            John Kinsella