David Morley

You Were Broken
for Les Murray

The amazed, massing shade
for the glacial valley, made
from a single araucaria
that smashed its way
by micrometers of birth-push
under five centuries of dusks
of carbon dioxide and rainfall,
while the volcanic rocks made landfall
against its unrolled, harbouring roots;

and the roots took the rocks in their arms
and placed them, magically,
like stone children, about itself
as it unfolded its fabulous tale:
of the wood heart mourned to flint
by slow labour and loneliness,
by what it could not reach, yet see
at distance, and of the sound of that sea,
and of the cruel brightness

of butterflies and grasses,
foreknowledge of their brevity,
of a heard stream, overhearing
prints of otters on its plane stones,
gold wagtails sprying over
the gravel and shallows of courtship;
of orange blames of gall-wasps, honey fungus,
the watch-turning of tree-creepers;
of blights of summer lightning,

of fire damage and that dark
year’s mark worn secretly,
a ring, forged inside a ring;
then the winter’s coronation closing
in a swaying crown of redwings,
cones, drab diagonals of pine-fall,
the lead winds hardening, and while
the stone children wept with rain
the great tree sheltered them.

Copyright, Carcanet Press 2007.

David Morley writes: 'For many years, I worked as an environmental scientist. I always liked the idea of science as a natural philosophy. I did a lot of fieldwork and used to deal with trees and the things that lived on trees - insects, birds, fungi. I’m fascinated by the age of trees, the stories they could tell. For example, an araucaria can be many thousands of years old - a sapling when the pyramids were built. This poem tells one tree’s life-story through a single unfolding sentence. This poem means a lot to me because it wrote itself over a single, unhurried morning. I liked it immediately and I still like it.'