Black Arrows

Fifty metres from your centred trunk

The ring of trees and shrubs form a circle,

A vegetated perimeter that shrouds the trains and suburbs

With multi-green foliage and golden wattle blossoms.

Standing alone in a small sea of grass at the end of a rarely-used rustic bush track, you cast a light shade in the winter’s sun.

Silvery-bark gleaming against blue sky,

Silver-green leaves curved, hanging vertically in the gentle breeze warmed by ground heated by the morning’s sun.

The sounds get through though, reminders of human proximity:

A jet high overhead, a passing train, the hum of traffic, a lawnmower;

Where do they not invade these days…?

Yet here — if you listen, centred — nature is still all around;

Beyond the intrusions of those that don’t appreciate you,

Bee-eater flocks trill to each other, kookaburra calls hold their families together; black-faced cuckoo-shrikes and brown honey-eaters go about their daily business, even as cockatoos warn of a hawk passing overhead.

Here, in your centre, wasps hover and buzz in menace, as ants and skinks descend and ascend your silvered skyway, each hoping to catch smaller critters napping and whisk them away for dinner or entombment.

I’m perched on the large rock at your base,

A rounded chunk of granite that isn’t from these parts;

One could wonder at how it got here, dis-placed…

Except, here — where development is so close — the answer is, probably, as often, that it fell from the back of a truck; no doubt some time ago.

How serendipitous for you;

You, who — like all of us on this third rock from the sun — found conditions favourable for your growth.

You, who — in the thirty years this block of land has stood dormant from further impact — have probably grown from within its shadow to shade it.

You, who have been protected from the slasher-blades by proximity to an accidentally-placed artefact of men.

Now, fifteen metres tall and broader than my shoulders you rise from the long, golden and seeding grass, buzzing with finch flocks.

This long grass, trampled in patches by the grazing and lounging wallabies — like the two who saw me and bounded off on a previous visit, beating an early morning retreat to the vegetated corridor of nearby Spring Creek, just as I saw their track and looked up with surprised attention.

You, however, are rooted to this spot, unable to move or flinch.

You — merely being — solitary, centred, surrounded by the lives you foster, protected for all your life by your guardian rock;

You, here, where your whole life has unfolded; here, where you are no longer safe.

You, because you stand alone, became the target of unwanted attentions; more apparent for the scratched bullseye carved by those who brought you harm.

The world should weep as such harms seep almost everywhere that humans go…

I hear you… and thousands like you…

I hear your Amazonian cousins suffering as they are cut-down, burned to ash, and destroyed…

In your case, I hear the silently-screaming impact craters testament to the scarring, glancing blows that hurt you and made you bleed, quietly.

Unable to sidestep the fast arrows driven into you at point-blank range by teenaged string-pullers, they penetrated your flesh, leaving holes in your bark, trying to heal through the weeks following each assault.

Still, greater dangers lurk…

More sinister than fast-moving arrows…

Survey pegs — red-tipped splintered brethren — lay hidden below the grass, like the second-hands of a ticking clock…

Soon, when the time is right to exploit, again,

The next wave of development will swamp you…

It will wipe this slate clean,

It will reconfigure the transient life-filled clearing you silently presided over,

As the next wave of incremental destruction sweeps onward, and the ongoing ecocide, the millions of death-by-a-thousand-cuts actions, continue…

…continue converting your loss into someone’s profit; on unbalanced balance-sheets, globally…

Your centred sentinel presence forgotten…

Except by those who lived in you, on you, around you and under you…

And those who saw you as a centred life-force, far more than a target

For the black arrows of progress…

Epilogue

This poem was written during the mild Southeast Queensland winter in 2019. I had just separated from my wife and family and had been taken-in by a wonderful friend and his family (may he rest in peace). They held me, without questions, for six months, as I grieved and sought solace in nature within walking distance of their home in Kuraby, south of Brisbane.

This was before Australia’s bitter 2019–2020 Black Summer bushfire season which started later this same year as the El niño drought continued.

If my poetry evokes your emotions you’ll find more here at And Now What