Tuesday poem: Limits
October 26, 2021
Limits ‘Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live.’ Pope Francis Four months ago the trees looked like trees drawn in charcoal by a depressed artist — simple strokes of black connecting earth to noon-time grey, throat-choking, skies. Now, watch the festoons of green circling the trunks, as if strewn by the world’s worst exterior decorator. Such vivid newness, almost artificial in its neon promise. And yet, such trees have known blazes many years, lightning-spat, or most carefully set, by those who shaped the land, farmed with fire, forty thousand years or more. We comfort ourselves, forget that this mega-blaze, man-made, was the very opposite of skill. We have changed the seasons, charged the air, dried the possibilities of rain into a parched riverbed of loss. Yes, the trees still push out leaves. Frail canopy above dead mounds of wombat, of lyre-bird-less, song-lost, ground. The reassurance of regeneration this time asks us how many more times green can possibly appear. If next year, and the next, another blaze exceeds all history, will even gumtrees stay gloomed — dead sticks we poked into a lessened land? PS Cottier
Everyone is pleased to see the bush regenerating after a fire, but how many times can it do so after the mega fires that climate change brings?
PS Cottier 