SHINRIN YOKU
If everybody on Earth had planted as many trees in their lifetime as I have done, the world would be forest and jungle from pole to pole. When I was a young nerd of 13 I could find and identify every single species of wildflower and weed within a 5 mile radius of my home and this lifelong interest in plants continued when I came to New Zealand. I suppose that knowing ones herbs is part and parcel of being an atheistic shaman and those plants are certainly a part of my poetry.
I read an article in a scientific magazine on the Japanese practice of Shinrin Yoku or “forest air bathing”. They believe that it is beneficial to your health to walk in the woods because you breathe in a whole host of molecules released by the trees which have a stimulating effect on your limbic system. I was taken by this idea and I introduced the notion of Shinrin Yoku as a genre of poetry on my internet web site. The idea took off and gained a vitality of its own. Many poets contributed poems to this new genre and were quick to criticize those that did not measure up to the presumed criteria for a proper Shinrin Yoku. I had given birth to a meme! I have included a couple of my own Shinrin Yoku submissions below.
Araucaria
We were not party people.
When more gregarious types
Got into the swing of things
At back to pumpkin time,
We shucked off glass slippers
And slunk off home to bed.
From Wellington to Palmerston
To relieve the tedium
We counted things.
Harrier hawks are good.
They strike a happy medium,
Somewhere between sheep
And three legged llamas in frequency.
But we tried the Norfolk Island Pine.
There are approximately
One hundred and thirty nine
Visible from the road
Without craning your neck unduly.
I love their Latin family name –
Araucariaceae
Fancy that, seven syllables,
Just like Wellington to Palmerston.
I love their silhouette
Like cross stitch trees on a pillow-case
Or Lego trees in a model town,
Totally geometric in their plan.
Not with the chaotic, random growth
Of normal natural trees.
These pines follow a simple algorithm,
Dance to an independent rhythm.
They’d never blend to make the bush,
Or form a forest or join in a jungle.
They are singular and but not unique,
Not quite the originality we seek.
Each perfect clone can stand alone
To grace a motel forecourt
Or march in step along a promenade.
From above they radiate starfishwise.
From the side exhibit symmetry
With whorls at Fibonacci intervals.
To lop or prune such trees
Is to cause gross mutilation.
A branch cut off to avoid a power line
Makes a man one-armed, lopsided,
No longer whole or undivided.
If an oak or ash fails at its growing tip,
The next bud in line simply takes up
The skyward stretch and all is cured.
Should however an araucaria
Be beheaded by a vandal,
Should he snuff the leading candle,
Then bloody anarchy erupts
Among the lower buds,
The perfect plan corrupts
And several new trunks compete
Like bifurcate lizard tails
Sprouting ugly on the bleeding stump.
Other trees thrive on flaws.
The araucaria is nothing if not entire.
This is not a farmers’ tree,
Not shade or timber or utility.
Perhaps some lonely farmer’s wife
With a love of opera or poetry
Might have the whimsy to plant
A Norfolk Island Pine
Or Monkey-puzzle Tree.
Perhaps some gardener
With a dream of Gondwanaland
Might plant one to encourage
Archaeopteryx to perch.
Perhaps a phoenix.
An ordinary Bird of Paradise
Would be rather nice.
I do not think that I believe
In animal to plant reincarnation,
An implausible rigmarole,
Though the word sounds oddly like
A second coming as a buttonhole,
But if I should chance to be reborn,
Pray that I do not return as lawn,
As a cabbage, poplar or gorse,
Nothing garbage, popular, coarse.
But let me be an araucaria,
My aura in a Norfolk Island Pine
Or better yet, my epitome,
My essence in a Monkey-puzzle Tree.
Ancient Trees
In my garden I have planted ancient trees,
My bequest to posterity.
Kauri, Norfolk Pine and Monkey-puzzle,
Bunya Bunya, Dawn Redwood and Gingko,
But I will not live to see them grow.
As yet these are but tree dreams,
With a millennium ahead of them,
A dubious future
Perhaps inhospitable and bleak.
But in my dreams they streak
Ahead in beanstalk spurts
And forest giant strides.
I dream of Gondwanaland
Where Monkey-puzzle trees stand
Stark, and shark tooth leaved.
Their pangolin branched pagoda
A fractal nightmare
Against a turquoise sky.
I dream of Norfolk Island Pines,
Candelabras of geometric whorls,
With giant combs of leaves
Like the antennae of monstrous moths
Sifting the breeze in ancient forests
For pollen of their own kind.
I dream of kauri in a sunlit glade
With amber resin glowing,
Flowing down their flanks.
Giant dragonflies flit in filtered rays
Through sunlight of the elder days.
I dream of ginkgo waving pale green fins,
Distinctive cloven leaves unchanged
Since their imprint in fossil shales.
Ginkgo fruits stink with colours mute,
No rainbow hues for lorikeets,
For marmosets no allure sweet.
Their foetid smell drifts down time
To lure triceratops to dine.
I dream of the Redwood of the Dawn
There at the beginning in paradise,
There through interglacials,
There through eons of the ice.
Here in the evening of the world
With lacy foliage unfurled.
Here the broken link to mend
In my Eden garden at the end.
The Founders’ Oak
“Out of The Strong Came Forth Sweetness.”
In Frimley Park the Founders' Oak
Is ancient of days.
A quercus of nature to live so long.
As oaks go and grow
It is vertically challenged.
Its massive limbs reach out
Horizontally,
Parallel to the parkscape,
Held up by will-to-live power
And some earth drawn energy
Known only to venerable trees.
One such branch had snapped
And given in to gravity.
The broken stump had been cut back
Below skin level by the tree surgeon,
Ragged flesh trimmed and left to heal.
As I walked the dogs
And passed within a dozen yards,
Oak spoke in silent consonants
From knurled burl and gnarled knot
And in the bilabial murmurings of bees.
Around the scar two smooth grey lips
Of bark had formed
To slowly seal the orifice,
But still there issued
A flow that would not be staunched,
A stream of wild bees
Foraging for nectar.
Fungus had caused within the oak
A womb of decay,
But just as icewine is mellifluous
From the noble Riesling rot,
So too is sweetness from this honey pot.
One year after this poem was written and these pictures were taken, vandals set fire in a hole at the roots of the tree and the inside of the tree including the exposed wood shown here and the bees’ nest was all burnt out. It was winter and in spring the tree set leaf as though nothing untoward had happened. Possibly the fire had done the tree a service by cauterizing a lot of rotten wood. It is proposed to fill the centre of the tree with concrete.
Shinrin Yoku
SHINRINGENRE.dochttp://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn7931-perspectives-take-a-deep-breath.htmlline
Walk barefoot and breathe deep.
Tread lightly on hallowed ground.
Toes burrow in forest soil,
The squirm of witchety grubs.
Fingers linger in leafy litter,
Scrabble like centipedes,
In touch with sweetly crumbled,
Warmly moist and furtive fumbled,
Humid, revitalizing humus.
In time-lapse see tree-birthed earth
Heave and seethe with hidden life,
The busy zone of cryptozoans,
Termites, slaters, springtails, snails,
A helter-skelter welter, whirligig,
Wonderful invertebrate world.
Breathe and absorb the come-hither
Odour-winks of lascivious flowers,
The heady, perfumed glances
Of voluptuous fruits,
The mealy mushroom aroma of decay.
We breathe out the miasma of the city
And breathe in a cocktail of delight.
Our limbic system is gently massaged
By a myriad forest scents.
Petal caressed and fern frond fondled,
We walk lightly under a canopy
Of filtered rays and mosaic shade.
We are haloed and sanctified.
In cathedral close given solace
And sanctuary from woes
By the blessing of the trees,
Baptised in the fragrant breeze.
Springtime
Walk in the coiled springtime
And hear the incremental ticking
Of the seasonal floral clock.
The flowers rouse early
To steal the pale sunshine
In the cold sleeping, leafless woods.
Dog’s Mercury, the harbinger,
Green flowered, insignificant,
Fleet, first-footing spring bringer.
And on that herald’s heels anemones,
Snow white, whimsical windflowers.
Delicate porcelain tea service laid
For the first night-wandering moths.
And hurrying after, the vivid, scented,
Bright bee-bait, daytime flowers.
The bluebells ring perfumed carillons,
The woods awash in water-colour seas.
The waxwork groups of yellow celandines
Make shining examples of themselves,
The gold gloss on their lips still wet.
And last perhaps before the oaks
Unfurl their spinnakers of leaves,
The Lords and Ladies, arum lilies,
Elegantly coifed and wimpled,
But with a smell to lure flesh flies
And a cage to imprison them.
Most mortal souls have never seen
The shy, elusive moschatel.
Four faces, four musketeers
Guarding each other’s backs.
A miniature town-hall clock,
A chronometer to measure longitude,
The perfection of springtime.
Body Snatchers
http://www.cdc.gov/nczved/divisions/dfbmd/diseases/cryptococcus/index.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps
What thoughts we poets have!
My brain sprouts a basketful of fungi:
Wood blueits and chanterelle,
Brain morel and Jew’s ear,
Destroying angel, panther cap.
One errant little whimsy,
Worse than gothic imaginings,
Must be the lowly cordiceps,
Body-snatcher of the fungal world.
I found them on the forest floor
Like pieces of kinked brown wire
Topped by a spore shaker pepper pot.
Beneath the soil each sprang
From the mahogany head
Of a shiny wooden grub.
Bumbling along as larvae do
On their caterpillar tracks,
It would have met a single spore
Of its dreadful nemesis.
The alien invader multiplied,
Seized motor control.
Seek no longer the green leaves of youth.
Your salad days are over.
Do not assume the lapis lazuli and gold
Of the chrysalis king.
Dream not of an angel’s life
Afloat on butterfly wings.
A darker metamorphosis awaits you.
As the scarab buries the dung ball,
As Ra drives the sun into the pit,
Inter yourself, my bride of death.
Just a wooden crate of jarra wood
Sitting on a Seattle wharf.
Just the faint laugh of a kookaburra
In the boreal forest of Canada.
Just the odd few thousand spores
Of a fungus known to favour Eucalypts.
Just the seals dying off the beach.
A straight line from Vancouver Island
To Brisbane in Australia crosses only sea.
Nothing much in fact to suggest
Invisible death stalked Vancouver Island woods.
Trampers and trekkers out to shinrin yoku
Under the tall hemlocks, Douglas firs and spruce,
Breathed deep the perfume of the trees.
Sneezed perhaps as the motes in God’s eye
Drizzled down in the filtered rays of sun.
Their minds occupied with other things,
They went home to their beds and died.
An autopsy showed their brains riddled
Like blue vein cheese with cells of mould,
Cryptococcus, the hidden one.
Unsedated, unrestrained, untended,
They might have sleepwalked in hospital gowns
Through the streets of the midnight town.
They might have found freshly dug gardens
And buried themselves feet first
Like retreating moles.
Come spring who knows
What glorious inflorescence
Like a magician’s bouquet
Would thrust out of an eye socket,
What reincarnation of beauty and truth,
What strange immortality.
What thoughts we poets have!
Miner’s Ease
Gold was found in Wombat Creek,
A grain or two, a flash in the pan,
A signal flare or flag of semaphore.
On the Australian bush telegraph
You could hear the crazy diggers laugh.
The auriferous seam, the mother lode,
An ancient stream bed dead-end led
Into the face of red rock Wombat Hill,
From whose veins just enough gold dust bled
To put a sparkle in dead men’s eyes
And lie heavy in their hearts like lead.
To access the buried seam
Men fought to establish claims
Among the grey and silver gums.
The Moebius strips of Eucalypts
Spun in the sun and settled thither
As aromatic petals in tinder crisp
Spindrift heaps of dry leaf litter.
The miners dug vertical shafts
Under the copper South Australian sun;
Gnawed and nibbled at the hard rock
With crowbar, shovel and joint-jar pick;
Heard the kookaburras jeer, and mock
Their labours and throat parched thirst.
They made their precious water eke
Until the long awaited weary trudge
Back down to the cool of Wombat Creek.
Some lucky miners struck it nugget rich
And lost it all in amber whisky jars
Or down a bar girl’s décolletage.
Some downed shovels, drowned sorrows,
Abandoned claims and gave up in despair,
Took their pick of compass points
To a promised land the sun anoints
And packed their swag to stagger there.
Canvas left to rot, baked bean cans to rust,
Latrines decomposed to earthiness
And claim markers to termite dust.
Among the slinky skink-rustled gum leaf litter,
Bright yellow flowers of Miner’s Ease appeared,
Root parasites of the grey and silver gums,
Jewels among the tailings and the dross,
Mementos of miners’ toil, suffering and loss.
Pollarded Plane Trees
The planes in Market Street
Are pruned and pollarded
Each year in early May.
Arboreal fingers are trimmed
To bare barked knuckles –
Thalidomide trees.
Buster, the chimpanzee,
Grabbed his keeper’s arm
And pulled it through the bars.
He bit off her thumb;
Pruned her index finger
Down to the middle joint;
And chewed on her forearm
Until the rising sap ran
And congealed in red gum.
Ashamed, he avoided her eye
In the weeks to come.
Each Monday morning
I raise my head in class;
Unfurl tendrils of green empathy.
Savagely I am lopped back;
My nails trimmed to the quick,
I clench my white knuckles.
They avoid eye contact
Habitually.
My non-conformity becomes plain.
I am pollarded.
Crocuses
At night in winter as the woodfire flared
And on the frosted lawn the cold moon glared,
The ballerinas lay entombed in earth.
Frozen teardrops on their lashes glistening,
The crocuses fold their lilac ballgowns neatly
And carefully. They lie in bed listening
For the first soft knock of the spring thrush
And then they don their finery and rush
For the ballroom floor, collide in the hallway,
Entangled in a tango of silk and taffeta
Like purple chickens in a death cult smother,
But each unravelled by the movement of the other.
Late Spring
It is springtime in the autumn of my life.
As the buds burst and blossom forth
On the cherry tree,
The leaves fall from my eyes
And all is bare.
I know that the snow-drift petals
Are but to attract the bees.
I know that the perfume of the orchid
In its pot on the patio
Was not designed for my nose,
Though I follow it enthralled.
My right eye with its damaged retina
Sees the world with gross distortion
Even through progressive lenses.
At least my intra-ocular transplant
Shows me again the colours of youth.
The buzzing of the early bees
Is now perceptible only in the range
Of sounds my aging ears accept.
And so my clever computer brain
Generates a reality of springtime
From imperfect sensory input
And releases endorphins into my blood
So that I might enjoy the warmth
Of the sun on my face,
Appreciate the gold of daffodils,
Thrill to the blackbird’s song
And swoon with the scents of springtime.
Tramp at Lawrence Hut
You see the forest but not the trees.
Your eyes are fixed on far horizons.
You dream of rest at journey’s end.
Your goal is to get there not the going,
To collect life’s debt and not the owing.
Tedious is the weary trail between.
Weeds and bush and stuff are all you’ve seen.
The rusty barbecue you notice
With its functional concrete basis.
But not the tufts of hare’s tail grass
With their whimsical cotton-woolly scuts;
Not the hare’s foot clover with its furry feet
Nor yellow cat’s ear with auricles so neat.
Did you see the alien walnut trees
Wage chemical warfare on their neighbours?
Did you feel the burdock’s Velcro fruit
Exploit you for dispersal favours?
In the kanuka you might have wondered at
The mould that coated all the twigs like soot.
You would not have seen the greenhood orchids
Hiding in their elven camouflage,
Holding native wasps to ransom
With their sexual subterfuge.
On your journey take delight not footsteps;
Every single moment care to explore;
Every radiant spark of life adore.
And when you come at last to heaven’s door,
Do not open it to go outside.
Beyond that gate is cold oblivion
And the darkness of eternity.
To smell, to taste, to touch, to see,
To know and feel and contemplate –
All is null and void beyond that gate.
Cut Orchid
For three weeks now
The cut-stem spray of orchid flowers
In a tall grey vase
Has graced the staffroom table
In its long slow agony of death.
This exorbitant bloom,
A spendthrift purveyor of pigment
And madly gay perfume,
Was meant to be an epiphyte
In some tall jungle tree,
Flashing urgent semaphore
In the filtered light
To pierce the forest gloom.
This cloying heavy scent
Of vanilla, patchouli and musk
That permeates this closed space,
Quickens our cold desires
And kindles long quiescent fires,
Was meant to percolate
Molecule by lonely molecule
Acres of canopy clouds
To draw moon-moths to its cold flame.
Orchid seed is a fine brown dust
That travels on the breeze
Like the smoke of a million bats
That coils and twists from some
Deep jungle cave to settle grain by grain
Among the bromeliads, stag's horn ferns
And festoons of Spanish moss.
In the staffroom we cease to notice
The withered labia that fade
From pink to brown.
We can no longer discern
The pheromones of heaven scent.
We never heard the anguish
Of the orchid's sterile scream,
Never marked the passing
Of our own one orchid dream.
Funky Fungi.
This picture is of an actual fungus I photographed. When I sighted it in New Zealand, it had only ever been sighted 3 or 4 times since its first sighting some 20 years previously. If you go to this website you will find a description of it.My blog on this fungus.
There was a toadstool near the path,
A quite extraordinary thing.
Cathedral architecture,
Convoluted gothic arch and spire,
Crinoline and silken petticoats.
One day only on this earth
Of glorious idiosyncracy
Before it is kicked to pieces
By some dog-walking fungiphobe
Or agent of indifference.
This was quite a funky fungus,
Rare as hens' teeth actually,
Amanita incognita,
My mushroom hide go seek, unique.
Today it had roulette fortune
To be noticed under tree shadow.
It took a lifetime of stargazing
To see the wanderer that twinkled;
To recognize in Mendel's peas
That one in every four was wrinkled.
And when you are transmuted
In the firmament of heaven,
One firefly lost against the glow of stars,
When the galactic nebulae
Burn with incandescent light,
Will someone, somewhere in the great out there
See a diamond twinkle in Aurora's blazing hair?
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