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Oak – Hearts of Oak
While travelling the less travelled path
I found you - an ancient tree
And your great splendour made me laugh
While you looked down on me
A few score years will see my end
For you hardly a branch will bend
While weighty thoughts prey on my mind
This is no time for you or your blessed kind
I think I see you shiver to my eye
As eve wears on and sun goes down the rain it
starts to cry
The path to trail and track and road so you’ve
seen it grow
And all the time you’ve borne a hearts
heavy load
While you looked down we have killed this earth
Time when bare inches have you added to your
girth
So small are we and yet become so strong
While your fixed stolid life has gone on long
and long
In a flash we may decide and eagerly chop you
down
Destroy your sweet and ancient heart and your
old oaken crown
Make for ourselves proud tables from your misery
Create cheap firewood to heat us from your livery
A death sentence is called,
you will be taken down and broken
draw lots for your woody cloak its all
You’ll get no reverence no token
Your sillhoutte it seems to tremble as I touch
your ancient stem
A premonition is it of my minds eye, my own green
gem
Born in better times you were when all life was
revered
But now scant regard you get no wonder you shivered
These nasty beasts that we’ve become don’t
value life at all
We draw our plans and bet on you as timber time
to fall
Have we forgot we grew up in ancient woods
Have we forgot our ancestory and our neighbourhoods
Have we forgot the world we saw when we landed
on the moon
Have we forgot how quickly we can wreak our present
doom
I should die for you I should if honour was
my name
But I move on my path, another holds my claim
My apathy my epitaph, no tears will rain for
me
For I am human virus, and no oak heart lives
in me
March 2006
Jon Proctor
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/forests/when-is-a-moratorium-not-a-moratorium
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/forests/caterpillars-and-contracts-20070521
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/forests/amazon-soya-moratorium-celebrates-first-anniversary-20070724
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