Winter Oak poem by Dyfed Lloyd Evans
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Winter Oak
Upon the high ridge brow, as sentry stands a solitary oak
Its scarecrow frame so dark against the evening sky
Younger than the hills, yet so much older now,
By far than all of mankind’s aspirations and his hopes
Old man of ancient, primal, woods, now lost
Cerebral dome of winter-naked boughs
Its fractal hemispheres a seething woody mass
Recalls again in depths of twice-millennial dream
Those memories of seasons, and of ancient ages, past
The lives that quickened on and in its form
Where summer canopy was as a world writ small
And there all life and death played out its course
As neighbours whispered, chattered, ancient tales
Of summer haze and howling winter gales
In chemical cacophony spread on the forest breeze
Those half-caught murmurings or brothers, lost
For on its hill it keeps a solitary wake
Mourning all those pyres that fed the land
Their dying embers echoed by the setting sun
Alone it breathes for all of us:
Its alveolar shape the planetary lung
Fired by a crown, the crimson solar orb
That hails this remnant of the Druid's sacred grove
This lightning-tree that rules the skyline, still.
Its scarecrow frame so dark against the evening sky
Younger than the hills, yet so much older now,
By far than all of mankind’s aspirations and his hopes
Old man of ancient, primal, woods, now lost
Cerebral dome of winter-naked boughs
Its fractal hemispheres a seething woody mass
Recalls again in depths of twice-millennial dream
Those memories of seasons, and of ancient ages, past
The lives that quickened on and in its form
Where summer canopy was as a world writ small
And there all life and death played out its course
As neighbours whispered, chattered, ancient tales
Of summer haze and howling winter gales
In chemical cacophony spread on the forest breeze
Those half-caught murmurings or brothers, lost
For on its hill it keeps a solitary wake
Mourning all those pyres that fed the land
Their dying embers echoed by the setting sun
Alone it breathes for all of us:
Its alveolar shape the planetary lung
Fired by a crown, the crimson solar orb
That hails this remnant of the Druid's sacred grove
This lightning-tree that rules the skyline, still.
This is another image from childhood. I grew up in what for modern Britain is a fairly wooded area, though most of the surrounding trees were imported spruce and fir. However, on our lands there was this one single giant oak. Isolated from the other trees it seemed both alone and somehow immortal, as if the changes to the landscape had not affected it in the least. Its changes through the seasons became an embodiment of the seasons themselves. Hence the poem above.
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