It was a tightly fought contest and from a dark and sombre shortlist, Sally Beets’ wonderfully caustic ‘Tree Surgery’ emerged as the overall winner and Pick of the Month for October. Maybe we all just needed to vent!
Sally is a poet and Young Adult fiction writer. She is completing a Masters in Children’s Literature and Creative writing at Goldsmiths University where she has had several pieces published in student publications. She has worked as a teacher in the past and is involved in various local literacy charities and projects based in London.
Tree Surgery
I was growing tired of trees, already,
before the end. Tired of going to nature reserves, forests,
woods, with your tree index book, looking up words in
Latin: Quercuis ilex, rubra, robur,
chasing after your over-excitable stinking dogs,
that muddied and laddered my tights,
or worse, when you produced that battered bat detector.
Everything comes back to trees: breath, literature, doors: the
furniture of life. Your calloused hands
always smelt and felt like bark,
your hair too – that space between your neck and
hairline, it was like that forest in Centre Parcs
where we went together, and then I alone, ‘escaping’,
(my chest tight in the healthy air)
– fresh, smelling faintly of damp sweat from
a freezing wrapped up winter walk.
Your favourite is the Oak. Like you, I thought:
classic, strong, reliable. You, the least complicated of men/
Even trees understand you –
Like the one you climbed in Epping Forest
and shouted from that you were king of the world, while
I refused to join in.
I’ve always liked willows: reflective, flexible, lazy.
Like the one where we had that perfect Indian Summer
picnic and made love next to cows in the stream, there was a
wedding just beyond the hedge.
I retain knowledge against my will, on how to
fell or pollard a tree. I know that they go into shock,
how they heal themselves, how you studied that tree
like an archaeologist, in Grace’s garden in Essex,
twisted like hair, it wormed its way in and
out of the ground, how you found a body
hanged from a tree in Hampstead Heath.
*****
Voters’ comments included:
An extraordinary poem with alarming and poignant imagery.
Painful yet beautiful.
I especially like the way, in this poem, the poet creates very painterly bucolic scenes with an economy of language. I also like the depiction of common everyday activities which are suddenly shot through with darker notes.
Brilliantly combines the allusive with the particular – the poem draws you in as it opens out.
I like trees and this poem takes a surprising way to show us what the title means with respect to a relationships – both literally & figuratively.