Nestled in Nature’s bosom
Enough to hear a heart,
You knew a few things about shelter:
How it must be taken
Before it’s bestowed,
How it can be rent apart.

When harboured from the North wind’s roar
You put down roots and spread,
A sheer tenacious will for life
Made home on hostile turf
And carpeted rain-blasted earth
With helicopter seeds:
Two halves kissing, need for need
In spiralling descent.

And so three centuries were spent
Beneath your verdant dome,
For who could merely amble on
When graced with such a sight?
In rounded boughs an Albion
Worthy of a fight,
Despite the walls built long since yours,
Those Roman roads, those reaving wars,
A gateway to a fairy realm
And refuge from the rain.

Yet what wayfarer stood to gain
From less where there was more?
Feeding the screaming of the machine
That bit against bark with tooth and nail,
The victimless violence that befell:
No slow-motion spinning of sycamore seeds
From life unto life anew
But a tearing, toppling vertigo
Where once a haven grew.

Earth felt the Wound, and Nature moaned,
And from the felling came the Fall.
And how did it feel to turn away
From the giant’s corpse slumped over the wall?
To shoulder the saw and climb the hill,
Having never known shelter at all?