They brought you down in segments,
neat, precise,
dear old one under which I sat and mused,
your crown now dismembered from its sky-look,
that grand assemblage of branch and birdcall
and the breathing green now stacked in piles,
stripped of sense,
and what the cockatoos once knew as home is fuel,
ready to be ash.

You were an entangled being,
vertical, immense,
connected down, connected up,
sustaining a small universe of relations,
a gathering,
a verb more than a noun:
reaching, sheltering, sounding,
holding, making a world of history
and a presence now,
your bark a palimpsest of seasons
scored by beaks and claws and weather
and the slow inscription of being rooted
while the world turned round and around you,
but now the living dark of your shadow
has no fall, and you can no longer be read.

Now you lie among your kind, horizontal,
an illiteracy,
waiting for the match, the pyre, the undoing of
what took a hundred years to say
in the only language soil understands,
and the smoke will carry you nowhere
anyone remembers, though the birds,
the birds, the birds,
will circle back
and circle back.

 

22/2/2026