The Wood and the Trees

I

Was there a family-tree of trees?
Older than elder, older than oak,
This strip of wild-wood penned in Surrey,
Inhabited by austere thrush, by blundering worm—
Thin as one tendril,
Fine as the fibre of a single root
Gropes back to wilder waste;
The hazel past the summer-house was hatched,
Nut out of nut to thicket shielding bison,
Browsed by giant elk.
This morning's bird, sings and has sung
The same self-coloured song since Eden,
Outside garden or before garden
One miocene morning
Perhaps a whole vernal world has heard
Even thrush-song one time original?

II

Astray in the traffic, grey asphalt and green thicket,
Left foot dragging, sunk in moss and fibre,
Hard-shod the other hammers onto concrete
And hot tarmac takes the print of holocene wheel and boot.
Our little friendly picnic spread upon the grass,
Ham-sandwiches and cheese, coffee and cakes, and these
Are poor relations of the feast
After the tracking, skinning, pounding, cutting,
Building of fire and turning of flesh;
Our day-excursion lives fall from the serious beast.

III

Gyrating in the spot-light   to the hot-beat
Of the Jazz-Club tonight    the children
Are looking for their garden;
The flowers that the spotlight   lets drop on the faces
Feel like the petals    that the apple-bough scatters,
Flicker on the dresses    like the sun across the woods:
How can they know,   too faintly recollecting,
Graceless in their gangs   the stalking of the victim
Hue and cry of the forest?
On street-corners   where they're waiting
Whispering and terrors   listening for the whistle
That brings the crowd together:
It's the horn of the huntsman   they would willingly hear.

IV

We are all of us on the look-out for a cheap lodging,
Somewhere to call our own, a door to shut the darkness out,
Home-makers all of us in this unholy world.
So now the struggle with red nature is finished,
We have won, we have our world, and living-room,
We are alone; and the forests have fallen, and the fires will come.

NOTES

No date, typescript sheet in Piggott archive apparently similar in appearance to other poems produced on his typewriter.
Published as Nancy Sandars' authorship 2002: see the Notes under Responses in the cathedral where the attribution is queried.