Trees
I shall die without learning the names
of these trees, and then it won't matter.
How good in the park to be on more
than nodding terms - on first-name speaking terms!
A few of course I know, some even
by botanical names - cupressus
macrocarpa is a favourite,
thanks to my Taranaki childhood.
There they made dairy-farm windbreaks,
melancholy, much-mutilated;
lawsoniana - big hedge we kids crawled
tunnelling darkly through, greening our limbs;
pinus insignis, so dominant
south of Auckland, where after passing
lush Waikato pastures, soon you
enter a zone of nothing but insignis,
sinisterly totalitarian
everywhere - insignis and in health,
as we used to say. Right to the peak
of steep mountains, they stood tall.
Their clear-felled miles: desolate -
soon replanted, shooting densely up.
Tree-ferns at their margins spoke
of the old bush - fronds to be fond of.
Cabbage-trees! - statuesque dignity,
deserving prouder names. Cordylines
(I had to look them up) - respectable -
name without nostalgia factor.
The tree-names lacking are European:
all those novels I've read about folk
under their elms, beech, oaks, what-have-you -
oaks I'm happy with, vague on the rest.
Fondling oakleaves and acorns is like
a dialogue annually renewed.
Those others - their leaves die and fall,
and are renewed half-noticed,
unfocused. At the Botanics,
I rush from tree to tree thinking Now
I know you - till I leave, vaguely,
as when dashing round a gallery
with countless labels calling Remember me.
The tree that saw me through childhood illness
watching at my window, filtering sun
and moon, I never thanked nor knew its name.
Macrocarpa, lawsoniana - thanks.
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