Once I was a tree

Long listed for the 2023 Urban Tree festival writing competition

shucking off my dirty husk, springing up 
impulsive as a back-garden ash-plant, 
sapling burgeoning from a cracked path

or a self-sown oak on the Common, wild 
and ferocious, the music of growing
all of my own.

               Instead, you coddled me
in a peat-free growing medium, inbibition 
calibrated to an optimum moisture range,

cotyledons kept misted, stem perfectly 
perpendicular to qualify for an Avenue 
Creation Exercise.

               Then you stepped up 
protection, two stakes to keep me in place,
chicken-wired and Q-coded for fortification.

My roots clutch at the aggregates of life, 
rubber crumb topping a solid finish for 
pedestrian traffic.

               I’m grateful but it’s left me 
unhuggable, half-way between hearth
and gutter, green infrastructure, with a tube

to keep me watered. Too tall and the axe 
falls when I’m deemed to be a potential 
public hazard,

               my aging limbs laborious 
to maintain. When the traffic noise dies, 
the wind is indistinguishable from a sigh.