In the Pine Forest
by Julian Bishop
where fir cones are home to creatures
that congregate to roll in sandy ashes
or thread through sticky sticks of needles
where beetles raise silver hymns
to the light and dark lives cower
behind small bark for protection
from a supercharged sun –
where longleaf pines gaze straight up
to sip the weak underside of sky
silhouettes filleted on the blue
that rock with the swing of hot rain
where the ditch-black trees stand
in stock-still night, in graveyard dark
where nothing else thrives
this is where pines breathe –
resinous, resonant with heat,
a hot heady tree gauze
gathering on the high canopy
an arboreal aerosol, a terpene
cocktail of sweet pine scents
microscopic droplets of hope
gathering in a protective nebula
a brief breathing space to help
an overheating Earth to cope –
this is where the taigas waver
where the last scented candle
still flickers at the ends of the world.
Inspiration: The inspiration for this poem was an article from 2014 in Nature magazine (picked up by BBC News) about research by an international group of scientists which found that vapours produced by pine trees turn into “aerosols” above boreal forests which then promote cooling by reflecting sunlight back into space. Walking in a pine forest is a powerful sensory experience anyway and I wanted to capture both that and its potential to alleviate climate change.
Image by Robert Balog from Pixabay
Julian Bishop is a lifelong amateur ecologist, keen runner and dog-lover. A former TV journalist, his first collection called We Saw It All Happen is out in early 2023 from Fly On The Wall Press.