As yesterday was the anniversary of my arrival in Sydney (for my stint at the Botanic Gardens in 2013), it seemed like the perfect day to receive an email from the folk at Plumwood Mountain (An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics) letting me know their first issue is now available online.
The poem of mine they have included considers the ants I met while I was in Australia. I like the idea of them being called back home, to the forests where they belong.
This week I’ve been enjoying listening to Germaine Greer read from her new book White Beech: The Rainforest Years, about her conservation efforts on 60 hectares of an old dairy farm in south eastern Queensland. It’s a great venture and her narrative is teeming with powerful evocations of the plant, bird and insect life at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley. As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says in The Independent, ‘It really is some story’, written by a woman who is ‘a force of nature and among its most erudite defenders’.
Closer to home, several of the trees in our woods were perilously near to crashing down in last autumn’s storms so they’ve had to be felled. They’re such enormous trees, fir and spruce, that their shift from vertical to horizontal makes the space out there feel quite different. It’s as if something’s been erased, a stretch of time lost. But I’m sure the ants will be very happy.
‘How long does it take to make the woods?’ How long does it take to make the woods? As long as it takes to make the world. The woods is present as the world is, the presence of all its past and of all its time to come. It is always finished, it is always being made, the act of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction. It is part of eternity, for its end and beginning belong to the end and beginning of all things, the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning. What is the way to the woods, how do you get there? By climbing up through the six days’ field, kept in all the body’s years, the body’s sorrow, weariness and joy, by passing through the narrow gate on the far side of that field where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way to the high original standing of the trees. By coming into the shadow, the shadow of the grace of the straight way’s ending, the shadow of the mercy of light. Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come into the woods you must leave behind the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. You must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf. Wendell Berry
Botanical 