The Tree Killers

I was preparing to post the poem below which is about the pathology of those who kill trees to improve their views, or because they dislike the trees shedding leaves, or because trees cast shade over their gardens, or because trees 'harbour' birds that wake them, or because possums inhabit the hollows, or because they wish to 'develop' an area, or because they feel a neighbour is encroaching (via a tree) on their 'rights, and so on. This is a global disease, but has very particular inflections in Australia where it is not uncommon to hear literal hatred expressed towards tree life. The expression 'tree huggers' is mainstream and used pejoratively on bumper stickers. 

In this colonial/neo-colonial nation, the tree too often represents something to be overcome, to be defeated as part of the 'pastoral' control of space. Ancient trees are especially vulnerable, and today another grotesque case of tree murder is being discussed, with 'state officials' by their own admission having a hand in it (and tree drs and pseudo-arborists, 'pruners' and 'loppers') — an 800-year-old peppermint tree. 

This should be scrutinised and critiqued on a global scale, and is further evidence of the abuse of country that underwrites the colonial control still so dominant in Australia. This should never be able to happen, but it happens frequently. Too much of it locates around leisure and providing 'access to nature' — how many carparks, trails through forests, and so on are decimated in the name of tourism and entertainment? It's remorseless. 

Though there is the obvious large-scale bush clearing and destruction of forest around the country through logging (even where there's a cessation of old-growth logging, miners still make massive inroads... e.g. bauxite industry in WA's southwest jarrah forests), mining, housing developments degradation of forest by leisure activities, much tree killing is done 'privately' and secretively. 

In the last decade we've seen 400-year-old jarrah trees killed in the Challar Forest near Walpole and also the famous Gelorup Jarrah (300-400 years old) was 'mysteriously' felled during the horror discussions about the route of the Bunbury/Gelorup bypass (we witnessed the extent of this destruction a couple of weeks ago).  Among others! 

This poem focusses on the classic drill at the base and poison technique, much favoured by urban tree haters and also by rural retrogrades (sometimes arguing 'fire safety' as a trigger expression if they are caught... or some other such specious go-to...).  I was appalled to find that there's actually a Quora that discusses how to secretly kill 'unwanted' neighbour's trees, outlining herbiciding to 'girdling' (ring-barking... a favourite colonial-settler land-clearing technique, absorbed into the urban as part of the furtive neo-colonialism of Australian cities). People fuse their pathologies of tree-hate (and all it implies) into communities built on distance and anonymity. The world is killed anonymously.

To hate trees in this way is to hate the very essence and core of being. Without trees, the biosphere will be finished. The aim to control, confine and limit tree-life is part of a pathology of colonial control that merges with a desire for a legacy 'built' out of pioneering (as verb) habitat into conformity to try to (en)force disconnection from its sacredness.

The Tree Killers

 

 

To evade detection

they seem to come at night

with muffled drills

 

and slick injections

of herbicide

or cocktails of poison,

 

attacking the base

of the trunk

while lusting

 

for the roots — tap roots,

heart roots, lateral roots

even the fine and sinker roots;

 

to undress the crown

to suit their vision

of clarity and ‘silence’ —

 

bird homes removed,

leaf obscurantism in their vision

of skyscraper or oil-slicked

 

river, waking to traffic

without birdsong.

These tree killers

 

seem unaware

of the nature of souls,

poisoning opposite

 

a school, destroying

an ecosystem between sea

and cliffs, operating

 

as lone hands

or as paid-up hitters

to do the dirty work

 

of the moneyed

(the no proof who, me?

we're entitled brigade).

 

And sometimes,

it’s out of a deep ‘need’

for neatening the world,

 

for removing boughs

and twigs and interference

from their ambits;

 

it seems an untreated

pathology

given credence

 

by every mass

clearing of bushland

and forest, of trees

 

that have managed

to hang on till now,

offering their shade.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Cécile Sauvage, "Child, pale embryo" (translation)

By Tracy

This is an early draft translation & I may still change it quite a bit, but it gives an idea of this remarkable poem and poet, pictured here with her children.

By Unknown author - The Life of Messiaen, Christopher Dingle, p.5, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5552358

Cécile Sauvage (1883-1927), Child, pale embryo...

 

Child, pale embryo, within the waters you sleep

Like a little dead god in a coffin of glass.

What you taste now is the lightweight existence

Of a fish that’s drowsing under reeds in the deep.

You live like a plant, and your unawareness

Entirely artless, is a lily half-opened

And it does not even know out of what profound

Layer within earth’s breast it is drawing substance.

 

My sap runs throughout you and lends you its soul,

Sweet bee-less flower whose brow bears no trace of dew.

Nonetheless the great grasping expanse demands you

And in my small refuge causes you to tremble.

 

Into the soil of my flesh, young and motherly,

You do not know how many threads your flesh has set,

And your gaze I already see so well will not 

Ever learn from books this innocent mystery.

 

How tight and close I hold you, who can know?

You belong to me as the dawn does to the plain,

Round about you my life is wrapped warm and woollen

To ward off the chill as your limbs secretly grow.

 

I surround, encompass you like the green almond

That closes its jewel-case on the milky kernel,

Like the cottony folds of the soft pod, the boll

With which the silken and infant seed is covered.

 

The tears that spring to my eyes, how well you know them,

They have the deep tang of my blood upon your lips,

You know what fervour, what burning fever slips,

Unleashes in my veins a fierce, relentless stream.

 

Toward my dark night I can see your arms venture

As if they would caress what is unknown in me,

That point where anyone constricted painfully

Feels an estrangement from everything in nature.

 

Listen, now while I am still within your hearing,

Leave the impression of your child-mouth in my breast,

Respond to my love with your obedient flesh

What other entwinement will ever seem so strong?

 

In days to come when I shall live flameless, single,

When you are a man and living less for my sake,

Over the times when I was with you I’ll look back,

Times when there were two of us at play in my soul.

 

For we do play sometimes. I give you my heart, see,

Vivid as a jewel flashing its mirages,

I give to you my eyes in which clear images

Upon a cool, fresh lake are rowing languidly.

 

Those are golden swans that seem as if they were ships,

Set upon the water, nymphs that belong to night.

Upon their brows the moon is dipping its bright hat

And they for you alone have smiles upon their lips.

 

When later on you take your early steps, likewise

The rose, the sun, the tree, the turtledove will make

In the light of new grace that guides your every look

The old familiar moves that you will recognise.

 

But you’ll no longer know upon which flaxen shore

Great silver fish that used to give you rings were found

Nor upon which hidden prairie’s secret ground

Lambs with their naive feet once leapt in such ardour.

 

For never again will my heart that speaks with yours

This hot and silent language made of our thoughts

Be able to fasten anew the loosened knots:

Dawn does not know the dark from which it emerges.

No, you’ll be unaware which Venus pure and fair

Dropped the flame of a kiss into your very blood,

The mystery’s anguish where art will be shattered,

And this taste for feeding, nurturing shy despair.

 

Nothing more of me will you know on that fatal

Day when you hurl yourself into rough life for good,

O my little mirror who see my solitude

Leaning anxiously at the edge of your crystal.

 

                                                (Translated by Tracy Ryan) 

 

With thanks to Peter Dayan for pointing me to this poet.

 

 

Celebrating John Kinsella's Collected Poems (UWAP) at City of Perth Library last night

By Tracy

In addition to John himself, participating readers & brilliant poets were: Alan Fyfe, Caitlin Maling, Cass Lynch, Emily Sun, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Siobhan Hodge & Tim Kinsella — with introductory talks by Tony Hughes d'Aeth and Lakshmi Kanchi.

Not everyone who took part is shown here — some of my images didn't come up as I'd hoped! Some were taken by me, others by Wendy Kinsella.

Thanks to UWA Publishing, City of Perth Library, WA Poets... and many others.

John Kinsella

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

John with Will Yeoman

Part of the audience

Mar Bucknell with John Kinsella, Rohit Kanchi

Tony Hughes d'Aeth

Lakshmi Kanchi & audience

Cass Lynch & audience

Emily Sun speaks

Tim Kinsella reads

John Kinsella speaks

Tim Kinsella reading

Scott-Patrick Mitchell speaks

Emily Sun

Caitlin Maling

Lakshmi Kanchi

Tim Kinsella

Tracy Ryan

Peter Wheeler in foreground, Mar Bucknell & Rohit Kanchi behind

John Kinsella, Lakshmi Kanchi, Steve Mickler

Lakshmi Kanchi & John Kinsella

Tony Hughes d'Aeth

Celebrating Kwame Dawes

The following poem is taken from Kwame Dawes' and my forthcoming collection with Peepal Tree, Mortality. I post it here to celebrate Kwame's superb collection Sturge Town, originally published with Peepal Tree in the UK and out in August with Norton in the USA. I also celebrate his generosity of spirit in dialoguing with me about poetry and poetics over the last decade. Kwame's poetry works to offer ways through the contradictions and crises of physical existence while maintaining its role as witness. A complex sense of the spiritual shifts and aligns with both personal and collective timelines making it a deeply focussed engagement with self, family, 'place', music, literature, 'the arts', politics, friendship and communities.

49.

This is a day when your “being out there”
makes all the difference for me, Kwame.
    I read your poem and journey
with it, if not with you. I am not limited
to my own perceptions, care of your grace

and generosity. Your poems increase me
as prayer or contemplation does, and in
    other ways that transition across
language, across topographies 
and demographics. I see remarkable

things after reading them, disturbing
things after reading them, and follow
    the branching roots of each line
simultaneously. Sky, people, and earth.
Lives encountered and recounted.

And on this day when your “being out there”
makes all the difference, we here contemplate
    the months to come – said to be the worst
summer before it has even got fully under-
way. Each day we prepare until we are at its end.

We’ve known each other long enough now, Kwame,
to note the variations in repetitions, the way
    cycles loop over themselves and entangle.
We know the limits and incredible
expansiveness of action, and we know

each other’s atmospheres of mortality.
Every poem is a surprise and a confirmation.
    Every poem is the one that follows 
and starts our conversation over again.
This pattern holds it shape, then doesn’t.

    John Kinsella

Anniversary approaching

By Tracy

Our son Tim recently found this old photo which we thought we'd share as we are soon to mark our thirtieth anniversary of being together, and it was taken around the time we were first married. (In Fremantle.) It was a very simple wedding, with our publishers as our two witnesses -- and that was it...

 

 

 

 

In Memory of Poet Lyn Hejinian

 

Granular

            in memory of Lyn Hejinian

 

Granular as people

            to people, arraying

with modicums

            and substantials,

setting implication

            of dead places

brought alive

            where a quote

becomes the ‘my’

            of an anecdote;

brief as interruption

            of decades, broadcast

resumed and reception

            a tool of wonder

as northern lights

            freak southern lights

and vice versa.

            Teaching-tool

of the time,

            all in thrall

but liberated;

            the clouds

were somewhere

            lost

but reform over lines

            too long

to condense.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Total Divestment from Military-related Industry

It is deeply affirming to see the peaceful campaigning against military connections and associations in Australian universities. Demilitarisation of places of learning is something I have been strongly advocating for over many years, and it surprises me that it has taken this long to become a focal point of rights issues. University involvement in militarism has frequently been the case, and it remains the case, even where universities deny such connections. My email signature at one university I am associated with reads:

for the complete demilitarisation of universities, schools, and places of learning

Having experienced ostracism and complaints (to put it mildly) within [that] university because of my stance, I wonder how the entrenched militarists feel about broader protest action? And I make this post as a plea for consistency among the protesters — ALL military associations lead to death somewhere in the world, and ALL military associations are culpable. Divestment (as the terms goes... placing it within its capitalist ambit and reflecting part of the core issue) from ALL weapons-related 'defence industry' and interests is the only just approach. 

To be selective is to condone death and suffering for 'other' people, to justify violence under 'certain circumstances' — the reason the cycles of violence persist in the world and dominate human interactions, ensuring the perpetuation of injustice. Divest should mean cease. Divest should mean there can be no learning with the spectre of death underwriting one's studies. Whether it's working on submarine sonar or receiving funding from any of the military-profiteering companies, it comes down to the same issue: these are modes predicated on death.

See this poem from 2020 written to a VC and university hierarchy about 'defence' industry ties to universities.

    John Kinsella

Letter to the Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities

 14/5/2024

 

To Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities

 

I wish to:

 

1. Support the absolute right for students to protest/camp etc. peacefully on university campuses.

2. Denounce the genocide being enacted by the Israeli military in Gaza. Further, to note the ongoing systemic oppression and neo-colonialism enacted by Israel’s government, military and settler-culture.

3. I wish to affirm universal human rights.

4. Speaking from a pacifist position that rejects all forms of violence, I wish to restate my many decades-long objection to weapons production (for anyone anywhere), the military in all its forms, and places of learning being used directly or indirectly for these purposes. It is abhorrent that universities have so deeply connected themselves with ‘defence’ — an industry of death.

5. Speak against any form of support for such violence.

6. Speak in support of diverse communities across the globe that respect each other, share space and materials, and are mutually supporting.

 

Thanks.

 

Sincerely,

 

Emeritus Professor John Kinsella, poet, environmentalist, peace activist and writer

Cease the Attacks on Rafah/Gaza

 

Cultivation

 

One of my students showed me the orchards

of her family deleted, the land rewritten.

And photos of the displaced and lost.

That was a year before the invasion

 

of Gaza and the erasure of trees

down to the splinters of stories.

The granaries broken, houses

split open, and now the last refuge

 

to be raised and offered as proof

of ‘resolve’. Buzzards, sparrow-

hawks, griffons... no longer raptors

but lost to the vanishing point.

 

Erosion is policy and endgame

its intonation. The Israeli military

is attempting to rewrite definitions

of suffering. To bulldoze lexicons.

 

Closing the crossing, harrying

the edges, compressing and dispersing

the soil until it is dust or slurry.

Cultivating a ruin whose fruit is death.

 

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

 

Threnody

 Threnody

 

Each martial act shatters the desert owl’s

hold on the grace of night which has seeped

into day through rips in walls of sky,

through holes in the carpet of earth —

fractures of rock and pits of sand.

 

Each martial act undoes the baby’s

cry for milk, the silently feeding lips

which would continue into sleep;

and when shells lob as precise

as history it wakes before it dies.

 

Each martial act is enabled by the silence

of ‘learning’, the immanence of ‘making

a living’, an expression that falls as dead

prayers over distance, over the local.

The desert owl remembers differently.

The desert owl remembers the same.

 

 

            John Kinsella

For My Friend Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024)

  

Elegy for Marjorie

 

I’ll talk as if neither of us are here,

leaves that cling or won’t fall,

fourth person in the dialogue.

 

When the body dissolves, a unity

forms around sand and leaves,

the very specific songs of remaining

 

words. In the absence of lyrics,

we make an assemblage of protests.

In a lyric of absence, we haul

 

a grammar across that landscaping.

Many meanings reduce to one

when we try to utter ‘development’.

 

Others will be having this conversation,

too. Now we’ve sorted the issue

of distance. Once. For all. And.

 

 

            John Kinsella

On Les Murray

Les and I had a complex interaction due to different ways of seeing the world, but we still had overlaps and strong shared interests. I think Les's dynamic thinking around language will always be a vital and interesting thing, and a poem like 'Bats' Ultrasound' shows an empathy with the non-human world that is moving, emphatic and genuine. You really get the sense that he not only 'feels being bat' but can draw connection between animal and human (mammal to mammal) that is both allegorical and quite real. 

Les, to me at least, seemed to identify as an outsider, and though some would say he relished this 'position', I felt that he was actually quite lonely amidst all the acclaim and public interest. Poetry for him seems to have been a bridge between his 'difference' and what he imagined the world was. As he sought to translate for us, he also sought to translate for himself. I think his finest poems are those full of 'strangeness' and yokings between the familiar and unfamiliar. Sometimes these yokings can jar and seem a little off (certainly from my pov, politically), but they can also bring a reader to self-analyse their own perceptions and use of language. 

There are many contradictions in this, but contradiction drove Les's poetry, and I am all for generative contradictions.  Because Les focalised all life through 'the glory of God', he seemingly and maybe for him necessarily created a hierarchy of humans over animals, but I always thought Les's empathy could be more than 'wonder'... in fact, it could be a form of almost secret sharing, an affinity in being unable to find a place in any hierarchy. 

I strongly believe Les's work is most often read in a reductive way — really, to get to his essence you have to almost lift him out of reality into that space where language is forming, is almost unutterable.

      John Kinsella

Poem for Poets Who Resist War

 Graphology Superscription 3

Two poets have been imprisoned in Russia for reading poems against war in Ukraine.

            Hooded crows are probing luminous gardens full of the storm.

A spring tide has ripped out of Bantry Harbour exposing winter mudflats —

there had been some flooding — and two people are digging for lugworms.

There is a prismatic glister of oil, an iridescence of unearthly behaviours.

All of this is tragic. All of this is connected. All of this aligns, though it might

not seem obvious. In the violent interstices. Mud and haemoglobin.

Standing outside the perspiring window and not looking back through its glass.

            Hooded crows are probing luminous gardens full of the storm.

Two poets have been imprisoned in Russia for reading poems against war in Ukraine.

 

 

            John Kinsella

On Modes of Protest — a letter regarding collective responses

On the need for collective, co-ordinated responses (to crimes against humanity, specifically the war on the people of Gaza): ...’only’ that peaceful interventions should (to my mind) be made in all possible contexts and that we need to speak to people to bring 'them' on board with addressing situations rather than entrench 'them' as enemies. I strongly believe that peace (in all contexts) can only come about by the privileging of open conversation, to show that human rights also involve the consciences of those who violate them and those consciences need addressing. As a pacifist, I am on the path of total disarmament (of all), and I think that empathy is core to change. At present there is no concrete world language of empathy outside a few individuals and groups — no means of translating different cultural values, lived experience, heritage  etc, into a comparative model so people generally understand difference as something necessary and inherent rather than something that poses a threat. That such rights are essential beyond all else. For me, the apparent total non-protest and the apparent lack of civil disobedience around Australia's militarisation (or, rather, its dramatic upscale from a force of colonial oppression to one with colonial-imperial designs) is entangled with all the other oppressions it overtly or inadvertently supports. So, really, I argue for a holistic approach to protest — we cannot hope to effectively help stop genocide in Gaza while the very basis of our lives in Australia is entrenched in the legacies of genocide itself, and future projections of this (via the realities of AUKUS and the like). We need to protest empathetically, persistently, emphatically (non-violently) and holistically and not in bits and pieces. A concerted but non-belligerent approach. Many will disagree with this, and see belligerence as essential, but in my life of enacting and participating in protest, I have found belligerence to be ineffective. Being emphatic and persistent — never giving in — is a different thing from 'belligerence'.

            John Kinsella

Stop the Carnage - Stop the War - Stop the Attacks on Gaza - Permanent Ceasefire - No More Violence - Leave Rafah in Peace!

 

Rafah

 

A city on the edge of catastrophe.

Designated ‘safe zone’ where,

 

defying the limits of space,

over a million people

 

have been herded.

Choke point. Crossing

 

to nowhere. Edge

of annihilation.

 

Such moments

too many in power

 

across the globe

want to make history

 

before and as they happen.

To relegate. To regret

 

after the fact,

after massacres

 

have been totted up

and converted to statistics.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

In Memory of Saskia Hamilton (1967-2023) - poet, editor and teacher

For Saskia

 

To discover months after — no reason

why anyone should tell me, the overlap

a geographical and temporal subset.

 

And I never arrived to read to your crowd,

but even then you were generous.

I can’t believe that such things

 

mean nothing to the dead —

no, there’s time to consider

even as we pass between classes,

 

the quick words of occasion.

Those peripheries of friendship;

associates from an earlier period.

 

But we did talk over punk

and Fugazi, our belief in poetry,

though never too much.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Sanctuary — a verse play

    John Kinsella

This anti-war, pro-refugee verse play is for anyone to use without permission. I have added a sound file read by Tim, Tracy and John here.

Sanctuary: for three players

 

 

Displaced Person 1

 

We must hurry,

they will close

the last crossing

at midnight.

Hurry!

 

 

Displaced Person 2

 

Why are they shutting people out?

Why are they abandoning us?

I cannot move faster.

I am tired. My legs

won’t work properly.

 

 

Person Right at Home

 

How much more do you expect

us to give? Our homes are our

castles

fortresses

sanctuaries.

We are responsible

for them. We are acting

responsibly. We must

protect our way of life,

as you of all people

should understand.

I took magnificent photos

of the northern lights —

close enough to touch,

bandwidths of the soul.

 

 

Displaced Person 2

 

You set numbers and if we

fall outside the quota

we are to be left nowhere?

You throw up fences

of false economies,

talk about gift horses

and who is eligible

and who is not.

 

 

Person Right at Home

 

Everyone is somewhere.

Even when you’re dead

you’re somewhere.

We are also people of faith.

Your somewhere

doesn’t have to be here.

I have always been

a weather watcher.

I pay for carbon credits

when I travel.

 

 

Displaced Person 1

 

We will not get through.

It is too close to midnight

and the shortest distance

isn’t a straight line.

 

 

Displaced Person 2

 

I am hearing they’re already

turning our people away.

And there’s talk of those

who have managed to cross over

being evicted as soon as the law

for their protection can be altered.

It’s happening as fast as an attack.

The roads have been blocked.

Trains cancelled. Flights

reserved for those with visas.

They promise instead to send

more weapons, more uniforms.

 

 

Displaced Person 1

 

Or they say we use weapons

against their weapons

which cancels us out.

We have not lifted

the weapons sent by anyone.

We are trying to leave the war zone,

our homes. Under the rubble

they remain our homes,

but they are uninhabitable.

The idea of home needs to stretch

to accommodate us, let us find peace.

 

 

Displaced Person 2

 

We left skies full of drones and missiles.

We left ground and buildings torn open.

We left a rising sea of blood. We left

under the gaze of the media: entertainment.

We left as witnesses who won’t be heard.

 

 

Person Right at Home

 

It’s complex, isn’t it. These overlapping

underlying interactive criss-crossing decussating

issues... the balance of life the means of production

the quality of life the scales of justice the contexts

of history. It’s complex. But a full house is a full house.

We ask for your understanding. All that ice

melting into the ocean. All those non-sequiturs.

We offer you weapons or we demand you do not

pick up weapons. We send food parcels or we starve

you if you do not comply. We are counter-indicative.

Stay at home. Stay where you are. Keep your footing.

 

 

Displaced Person 1

 

A literacy of loss.

A literacy of avoidance.

A literacy of evasion.

A literacy of production.

A literacy of accumulation.

A declaration of fatigue,

of weariness with ‘plights’,

of the diction of ‘bathos’.

A loss of balance. Vertigo.

And if we can’t speak,

we can only be silent,

irrelevant? Homeless.

Occupants of somewhere.

Nowhere. Fluctuations

in the atmosphere.