Poem of the Month - April 2009

Yew, Fortingall

It was always a good location; a pleasing aspect, open vista. Off the beaten track.
They came. They saw. Fought their corner to settle nearby, construct their places
of worship. Thin blue ribbons of smoke drifted skyward, encouraged stargazing.

It was my party piece that sold them: every so often I’d seem to keel over and die
then, just when it looked like the chop and splitting me into kindling
was on the cards - Hey Presto, Lord be praised - new shoots!

And so, once more, the wedding parties, mourners, random gangs of vandals
paraded through my revivalist roots. Everyone wanted a piece of me, a branch
of immortality. Torches scorched my trunk. I was stripped, skinned, gutted.

The ultimate celebrity geriatric now, I’m knotted, warped, I’m propped and pinned
in a typical attitude of Yewishness. Without the crutches and the drystane dykes
I’d have let go centuries back, crumpled in on myself like an old soak.

How homo sapiens loves to plunder: still, just the specialists now;
cone-gatherers, cutting pinchers, grafters. Cloning’s where it’s at:
seeding my DNA across the land. I have no choice but to proliferate.

by Dilys Rose

From Twinset (Knucker Press, 2008)

Poem supplied courtesy of Knucker Press.

A few words about the poem This poem was written as part of a long-distance collaboration with the Tasmanian poet, Karen Knight, whom I met through a UNESCO/City of Literature Exchange Fellowship.  Our subsequent email correspondence for over a year resulted in the publication of Twinset (Knucker Press, 2008) which contains twelve poems each on twinned topics, with accompanying artwork by Polly Thelwall and Laurie Hastings. One topic we had agreed on was trees.  Our landscapes offered considerable differences but we wanted similarities too.  Karen wrote about a blue gum, or eucalyptus, and I wrote about a yew.  The twinning aspect here was that both species have a capacity for regeneration. The gum produces new growth after a bush fire, the yew generates a new trunk in an old root bole.  Over millennia, the Fortingall Yew, considered by some to be the oldest living thing in Europe, has received great reverence but also, in the name of reverence, considerable abuse. It stands - still, just -  as an ancient example of our destructive desire to possess what we esteem.

About the poet Dilys Rose lives in Edinburgh and teaches on the MSc in creative writing at Edinburgh University.   She writes mainly fiction and poetry and has published ten books, most recently Lord of Illusions (short stories) and Bodywork (poetry).  She also enjoys collaborations with visual artists and composers.  Recent collaborations include the libretto for The Child of Europe, an opera based on the life of Kaspar Hauser, scheduled for performance in spring 2010, and Twinset.  She is currently working on a novel set in the 60s.