Of Fire Damage by David Morley

You were broken

for Les Murray

The amazed, massing shade

for the glacial valley, made

from a single araucaria

that smashed its way

by micrometers of birth-push

under five centuries of dusks

of carbon dioxide and rainfall,

while the volcanic rocks made landfall

against its unrolled, harbouring roots;

and the roots took the rocks in their arms

and placed them, magically,

like stone children, about itself

as it unfolded its fabulous tale:

of the wood heart mourned to flint

by slow labour and loneliness,

by what it could not reach, yet see

at distance, and of the sound of that sea,

and of the cruel brightness

of butterflies and grasses,

foreknowledge of their brevity,

of a heard stream, overhearing

prints of otters on its plane stones,

gold wagtails sprying over

the gravel and shallows of courtship;

of orange blames of gall-wasps, honey fungus,

the watch-turning of tree-creepers;

of blights of summer lightning,

of fire damage and that dark

year’s mark worn secretly,

a ring, forged inside a ring;

then the winter’s coronation closing

in a swaying crown of redwings,

cones, drab diagonals of pine-fall,

the lead winds hardening, and while

the stone children wept with rain

the great tree sheltered them.

As I have written elsewhere, complexity is what writers pass through to gain simplicity and clarity, and this poem represents that journey for me. It opens on an image of an araucaria in a poem of the same title by the Italian poet Ungaretti, but then unfolds its own complex, interweaving storyline. The poem is stripped to clear images and winds through one sentence of one hundred and ninety-five words. You Were Broken is a poem about the complexity of connectivity; biological connectivity but also the intricacy and vulnerability of emotional connections. In some ways it’s a terribly lonely poem, but also a poem about companionship even if the tree’s companions are stones. To finish: any poem should be the visible part of an iceberg. As Hemingway put it, the knowledge a writer brings to the creation of a literary work is the unrevealed submerged section of that same iceberg. The passage from complexity to simplicity is about making sure most of that hidden iceberg remains invisible.