Dead Loss
‘After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.’
‘Binsey Poplars’, Gerard Manley Hopkins
All the trees on the site triangle of the shopping centre have been
cut down and then there was no building
and the birch stems reached up again like hands
over the builder’s barricade except not like hands
as hands cut them down.
Small fold of green leaves, a corner eye shape gone.
I care. I don’t care. I drive my car.
The bestiality of trees cut scrub scrub dub:
prayer book hats and orange boots
like fungi on the foot.
The bullfinch scrub is bulldozed: all the birds
retreat into the thorn thicket tidier and tight,
each twig is laced with small encaustic bodies;
prisoners of amber; birds fly in zigs the river
breath hangs like a mist fronts of stone flies.
Why is nothing here? Now. Nothing was here.
Hands that worked here long evicted.
Only scrub. Only a small farm copse. Dead land.
These trees grew because there was nothing.
I moved here to get away from it all.
I care. I don’t care. I drive my car.
Small fold of green leaves pulls down the manageable sky.
5 farms became one. Estate. Sporty absent laird.
Builder. Forcible purchase. The trees were nothing.
The greenshade. Suggestive wet. Surrendered
flags of drained clarty hole edges buckled up receding.
We kept some. Plastic nets on trees. The birds nest anyway.
Cut them. Take each bird’s heart and nail it to the fence.
Smash the eggs the scrub would have held. Moss lichen
bowls cupping the future like hands.
Prick my eyes. The trees were dirty.
Now I can see right through to the llama field
when jogging and the cars circle the roundabout.
All the trees on the triangle of the shopping centre have been
cut down and then there was no building. Lockdown.
I care. I don’t care. I drive my car,
and the birch stems reached up again like hands
over the builder’s barricade except not like hands
as hands cut them down.
About this poem
This poem was chosen by Hugh McMillan as part of the Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Champions’ project, a guest curatorship programme to help extend our national reach.
Hugh McMillan says, ‘Bridget Khursheed is a self-proclaimed computer geek, studying for an MSC in Cyber Security. Her poetry consists of “disruptive text, sound art, art poetry, spoken word, scraps, recipes, contextual poetry, peripatetic writing, engineering, hacking, online text”. She is interested in the fragments and codes that make up our narratives and histories. In Bridget’s poem ‘Dead Loss’ the incomprehensible short term felling of trees and its effects echo the sense of loss in Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘Binsey Poplars’: ‘When we hew or delve:/ After-comers cannot guess the beauty been..’.’
