Monday, April 8, 2013

The tree and the street-light

Trees at night,
In fluorescent street-light
Look, to me, like a skeleton

Their fingers are long,
And the union is wrong -
A delicate, sick sort of specimen

No ancient scholar would think
The universe could shrink -
Contort - so that these two may meld

Organic bark thread -
Made, artificially, dead
By bulbs knowing how branches are held

Bare bones against the dark
Quivering, pale in the park
Creatures of a ghostly constitution

Once made mighty at dusk, 
Now a worn-wooden husk
No longer sleeps - or revels - in illusion

Stripped of their mysterious power,
As the lamps switch on at the hour
They are frozen in bright, brittle stillness

Exiled from black forest waves,
More the patrons of graves -
Stricken with an industrial illness.