A Eulogy for an Ash Tree
I had to share this with someone. It doesn't matter if no one comments, so long as one person reads it I'm happy.
The boy watched the fire and recoiled slightly as it licked his gloved fingers. He felt a twinge of guilt as it coiled around the magnificent ash tree trunk, snaring it in its clutches, turning its bark blood red with heat. At each end of the log, steam hissed out and intertwined with the smoke that billowed upwards into the starry black sky. He felt such guilt because even though this tree had been dead for years, it had been he who had wrapped a length of thick blue rope around it, choking it before he hauled it out of its nest on the side of the little stony hill. It had not fallen gracefully; instead it snagged on a tangle of hawthorn bushes before leaning heavily on a fence that ran along the back of the garden. He had tugged it then, tearing away shrubs and casting a scar on the bark of a wizened oak tree that stood guardian over the sparse bushes below it. He hadn't even thought about the history the tree had surpassed as he had sliced at it messily with a hand saw. It had been a part of the hedge that ran for miles along a farmer’s field before the land had been sold to his grandfather to develop into housing. All that remained of that great hedge now were a few paltry honeysuckle shrubs and occasionally vast oaks that held up the sky with a thousand pointing fingers. This burning ash tree had stood against wind and rain before the fifties, before even his parents had been born. Friend to the magpie and the cow, now it was food for the bonfire that roared away into the still night and only one soul was here to witness its passing.
Time crept by and the flames began to dull. The pyre crackled and spat for want of more sustenance before it had even tackled the tree fully. It could not digest it entirely so instead it burnt into the centre of the log and caused it to sag and then collapse upon itself into two pieces. There it lay now against the glowing embers in its ill befitting end. The boy turned away and traipsed back through the ankle high nettles and bluebells. There was an orange glow on the horizon to the south: the powerful light of the motorway. He could hear it, that quiet rumble of a million cars in procession, far away. The ash tree had lived long enough to see this whole landscape change, it would have been much smaller but it would no doubt have guarded the farmer’s field whilst men died in similar fields across the channel almost a hundred years ago. It had seen a sleepy hamlet grow into a commuter town and it had seen the rise of the motorway which surged into the heart of the capital and it had stood alone and ignored until it had died. And so that is who this eulogy is written for; a tree that had endured and survived prime ministers, kings and queens, droughts and sodden downpours, standing as a vanguard of the old ways and old times whilst everything around it evolved.
__________________
:
|
Oh yeah, fair point. Maybe he was just tortured until he lost consciousness.
|
|
