Norwegian Trees Still Bear Evidence of a WWII German Battleship
According to their research, one tree sampled saw no new growth for nine years after 1945.
– The Smithsonian
Imagine a ship pulls up into your fjord and releases a cloud
of chemical mist. You’re the landscape, and you’re thick with trees.
Pines far as the eye can see. Needles for miles, cones for yonks.
Season after season. Every year is cold enough to make those
measurements incremental, the rings that tell the years within you.
But after, everything stops, leaving you firmly at the darkest line.
The smokescreen put off by your intruder says: this didn’t happen.
No one will believe you. There is no proof, no record, no mark –
just absence. The smog of acid spilled to camouflage the carnage
of the damage, just a fog before the rain. Never mind the stunting
of growth, the killing off of parts that will take decades to recover.
Never mind how often since you’ve felt like you can’t breathe.
Without the evergreen, a tree can’t grow. Can’t photosynthesise.
Might stop eating. Might never quite grow back the same. Years
pass before life returns, before the disfigurement of fascicles
unballs from a burned-up fist. Before the brown and brittle pins
become green filaments again, letting the light in. Before bracts
will open hesitantly, holding the seeds, hoping for a clean wind.
Miranda Lynn Barnes is an American living near Nottingham. Her debut pamphlet, Blue Dot Aubade, was published with V. Press in 2020. Miranda is co-author of Formulations (Small Press), a collaborative pamphlet of new poetic forms based in chemistry, with Stephen Paul Wren. Website: https://mirandalynnbarnes.wordpress.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LuminousJune