Always the last to fall.

Every year, in every storm

I cling, sighing

with my marcescent self,

hanging on when others fall away.

It takes a storm to shift my limpet grip.

But despite your winds of climate change

raging tempestuous from the north

gusting their aggressive sighs,

my desiccated wither

still gripped on the twig-hold of hope.

I stayed,

praying that only new buds of self

would oust my clutch.

But storm Arwen uprooted us whole.

With age-old arboured friends

my vast mother-trunk split her rooted hold

and fell

back to her earthen self

with a deafening thud

- a loss that reverberated

in the grieving grounds

of Wallington’s ancient woodland.

Dazed from the syncope of our fall

we now shall slowly rot into another life

- Nature’s ways you fail to see.

Fading forwards

into a collective unknown.

Anew.

But please don’t scurry us

with saw!

Don't rake us hard

to neaten our demise!

Don’t sanitise our fall

and fail to swallow the poignant pill -

this impact of your elsewhere choice

of bloat and wanton greed

upon our Natural world!

Let our nascent self just wait

upon a frosty morn, when we

- unwitting crisp

with winter crystal jewels tight around us

may look up

into the memorial gap

in our eighteenth century canopy

to see the potential space

from which we fell

open realms of possibilities.

Let the ‘Why’ resound!

That we can grow again.

Let our leaf sigh from crisp to thaw

and leave us now

to rot our marcescent orange selves

back into our earth

and forward

through our wither

to make mulch

to feed some other growth.

And in a further breeze of change

let us shiver in our wintering

towards becoming we know not what.

And so thus grow

-as you must now -

back to a future unknown self.

Looking forwards.

Letting die

the things that hold us.

Now withered

our skeletal self can see

a flicker of emergent greening -

up from a broken elbow

of a fallen trunk

you dared to leave.

In this wither of our days

we watch their lettuce green

spring, and sigh with relief

as, at last our marcescent cling

can ebb

and drop towards another life.

Please hold - with us - your natural trust.

Let nature's grip to cling

just ebb away

each year

into freedom’s humble fall

that carpets an ‘other’ path,

quite apart from your neat manicure.

Allow growth

unknown,

and vistas

to glow new.