ROYAL OAK

 
Beyond the brakes and hangars of the close, sociable trees

We come to the relative isolation of the oak.

Hard to know if this is the loneliness of royalty

Or a club bore rooted to his old spot of ground

And clearing the surrounds over a period of centuries.

From his talk you’d think he antedated the Norman yoke,

Held engrained the true blue print of ancestral loyalty,

Great great granary of the living crown,

Sent scions to Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt,

Decked and masted the fleet from his towering timberhood,

Pressed his peers for Portsmouth, and personally fought

Old Boney from the briny with the great Admiral Collingwood.

 

He’d have you know he is the last to hold the line

Of the original estate, sole remaining sentinel

Along the proud but now ploughed-low circumference

Where musket balls rise acorn-like up through the tilth,

Field-fast general until the treaty’s signed,

Cracked with winter soldiering as cold-iron Cromwell,

Assailed windmill, unsailed, still blown influence,

Racked vertical, deserted, the standing cross itself,

Enduring martyr, hard heart arteried, corpse alive,

Time’s tything store, standstill lumbered coppice,

All these things and more while the seasons arrive

Then fall again in gold and blood, returnable as poppies.

 

The bluster gusts its camouflage, and when it’s passed

And we come close and see the texture of the trunk,

All elephantine warts on greater carbuncles,

And sense the inner evidence of a hollow ring,

Then we see, as fungus fruit all bulbous-arsed,

The fibs fatter than Falstaff, sack-sad and drunk,

Encircling, like the vacant, round and ranting uncle

Little Sir Toby Jug, the nothing of a king.

Look up at the poll, all pollarded to hell,

Uselessness his true ally in this long armistice,

Four-square standing where the great ones fell,

Self remembering, embraced by armlessness.