Bark odes

Forget about the so-called bible codes, feast your eyes on ring sonnets and bark odes! 

Every schoolchild knows how bees invented television, and ants conceived telepathy, but new advanced research by the Royale Botanical Association has discovered that common trees, like the easily recognisable horse chestnut (which spawned a whole human infantile subculture of conkers), or the fast-growing walnut, have secretly been composing poetry for millennia. In forest and copse, timeless wood-wordsmiths etch lyrical prose with epochal variations, often discussing nature and entropy with a matchstick profundity that mere mortals like us could never hope to equal.  

Diatribes..? Well, yes, certainly – the focus of political and social commentaries by trees is particularly fascinating. Despite the usual pacifism of trees, their virulent polemical rants about several varieties parasitical fungi are very probably more fascistically objectionable than most forms of human racism. And let’s not forget the infamous troubles of colonial ‘oppression’ between American oaks and Canadian maples (as immortalised in rock music by that Rush song), which first led curious researchers on the trail of so-called ‘vegetable panic attacks’ - detected as a subtle, almost psychically attuned, infrared mottling on bark (see picture: ‘new proverbs for old’ - translated from Aramaic), and in false colour imaging of seasonal ring patterns (pictured: ‘this is what the Romans did for us’ - abridged version).

Terror felt by trees has increased dramatically ever since humanity’s industrial revolution forever changed agricultural practices regarding forestry, so trees that once feared campfires, and felling by mankind’s primitive axes, nowadays have to contend with chainsaws and mechanical up-rooters. Dendrochronology studies, finding disturbing patterns of climate change, prompted further investigations into extraordinary upheavals in the social history of trees. Although quite immobile, the lividly roving rage of activist-poet trees is found in their classic agitprop protest anthem, ‘timber is murder’. You don’t want to know what noble pines think about humankind’s ritual barbarism of Christmastime! And yet, preliminary evidence suggests that many trees maintain a somewhat contrary respect for the supposedly civilising influence of the ‘book publishing’ industry upon homo sapiens’ typically callous banditry.

Shunned by naturally endowed trees, the forced-evolutionary leapfrog of their gene-mod vegetable cousins - the unwholesomely motile and wholly dangerous, so-called ‘triffids’; is another twig of contention between species. It’s a deep-rooted sourness (epitomised by the silent seething specificity of a standard ‘walk on by’ rejection) that resulted in triffids’ irreversible expulsion from the big society of trees, after redwood parliamentary debates, and even disbarment from regular autumnal leaf-dropping parties. Unfortunately, some of the recent ‘scientific’ discoveries concerning poetry by trees are entirely spurious, at best. There is no compelling data whatsoever that any modern trees send ‘txt’ messages.  

 Activity is very slow in this gym for trees...