A Christmas Tree's Lament

Once upon a winter's eve,
They came in mobs, those deadly thieves!
We spread our roots, our breaths drew in,
And then we bellowed, I and kin:
“Leave here, desist, replant your roots!”
They came for us in shiny boots.
They placed their teeth upon a string,
and showed us to that wicked thing.
They wrapped it round, in their endeavour
to cut us from our roots, to sever
each of us from earthy sphere,
And as we crashed, they cried and cheered!

They stacked us up on deerless sleighs,

And formed with us a foul bouquet,

And as they stole us, engine booming,

I found I was no better than a human.

I was from deep black soil dissected.

Now humans' unearthed state reflected

in my own proud trunk made rootless,

subject now to journey fruitless.

As savaged flesh wept and swelt,

Each jolt and thud was sorely felt

Till we from oily trap alighted,

And heaps of dead and dying sighted.

We might have thought our number small

Until we saw that ghastly haul.

It might have been a minor feud,

an act of impulse, a nasty mood,

but in this vale of broken crowns,

on this necropolitic ground,

at this high reach of Death's grey tide,

was an act of genocide.

And even now, and even yet,

exhausted not was Man's dark threat.

They came in ones and fives and threes.

They drifted up upon the breeze.

But how they differed from rancid stink

was in what they carried: those shards of clink,

that lit their eyes and filled their grip,

and brimmed their dreams and curled their lips.

And of this coin, what was the aim?

Of which foul sport were we the game?

What was the scheme behind our murder?

All was revealed as they began to barter.

And what the price of one arboris,

apart, of course, from its biosis?

Thirty pieces was final toll

to him, the brand new owner of my soul.

With nothing more than mute egress,

my time with kindred deliquesced.

Aye, from my brethren I was split,

And carried then to odorous pit,

shakingly upon their shoulders,

just as the cousin growing colder.

Placed upright by mantelshelf,

in mockery of my rooted self,

now I their furrow did survey

in all its grim and dark decay.

Of all their squalor and unfitness,

was I to be the judge and witness.

And back they looked with eyes agleam,

dashing hopes to dwell unseen.

To me they brought their tawdry garnish,

and I did they begin to furnish,

and when at last they came away,

I stood replete in gaudy lingerie.

And though clothed like courtesan,

my torment only now began,

for now they gulped and gorged and pranced,

frolicked in a state of trance.

I, in the midst of wilding pack,

had turned to aphrodisiac.

Time’s suffrance is ineluctable

yet passage indestructible.

It crept as surely as decay,

until I found I had outstayed

my welcome in that wretched dwelling,

and now my final fate was swelling

in Man's dark heart as they denuded

me of frilly garment, excluded

then from frosty home to street,

my transformation near complete.

Whence had I been sequined guest,

now was forsaken, dispossessed.

And here I am, and here remain,

my human value all but drained.

I lie here butchered in the lane

with others of my green domain.

Who knows what fate may have in store?

And yet I sense there's little more.

My shadow's long; my noose at morning.

There's only time to share this warning.

Should you consort with humankind,

see us, and do not enter blind.

For Man's had many staunch allies

and led each one to her demise.

The Thrill of the Case – Part Five

Read part one, part two, part three or part four of The Thrill of the Case.

‘Forlorn’, thought Zagonella as she took another piece of shortbread from the packet and dunked it into the warm brown liquid in her cup, was easily the saddest word in the English language. First, it was the way it captured the exact moment when hope dissolved like a biscuit in a hot drink. ‘Crestfallen’, of course, attempted much the same trick but rather evoked the comic image of a cockerel’s crown flopping sideways. And then there was the sound of it, two falling notes, the second one longer and deeper and sadder even than the first as the devastation of a once shining dream was realised.

And forlorn had indeed been the expression on poor Everarck’s face after he’d told her in a state of great triumph and agitation about this dodgy-sounding start-up so-called Court, which she imagined being run out of a van with the engine constantly running, and then she’d told him what she thought of it.

‘A silly game for silly boys,’ is what she’d said in the face of his glistening hopefulness, which was in fact Everarck’s own face, ‘I told you already that you do all these things just because you care so much about what other people think of you, all because you have no idea what to think of yourself. You’re a clever man, Everarck, but you waste it. You waste it on stupid things like this.’

And then Everarck had looked forlorn, and she’d regretted every word just as much as she’d been convinced that each one was necessary before she’d said it.

What was it about ‘forlorn’ that made her so sad? As she wondered, another face came to her, one from long ago that she could remember looking up at, from a distance, on an old man, instead of a young one. There had been a man who had rushed to greet his wife and give her a hug out of the sheer pleasure of seeing her again, for the 16,000^th time in their long marriage, but who had forgotten – again – that she no longer took pleasure in these embraces.

With the benefit of years and studies in psychology, Zagonella understood that her grandmother felt betrayed by her grandfather’s forgetfulness, that she was always angry with him, and that even the odd moments when he recognised her without assistance were, to her, just as symptomatic of his disease as the moments when he didn’t. Even so, the memory of her grandmother standing bolt upright as her grandfather hugged her, and just that same transformation of happy anticipation to confusion to realisation to sadness like a snowflake melting in the palm of your hand; that memory, every time it came to her, was a bullet through the heart.

And here she was, working in this hospital which specialised in mental illnesses, trying to cure that bullet wound every day of her life. And there she was with this man, this half-man, half-boy, sweet and innocent, unworldly and talented, rudderless and impulsive. She loved him, and she could not wish she didn’t, but what was she supposed to think; what was she supposed to do when he presented her with this contract, its incomprehensible black on glaring white, and she’d snatched it from his hand and flicked back page after page until she got to the last and found his strange squiggly signature sitting at the bottom on its hard horizontal line? Just what, in the name of God, was she supposed to do?

Read part 6 of The Thrill of the Case.