UNDER THE TREES

Her Majesty’s Engineers are working hard

with their Polish colleagues to erect

a twenty foot high wall of razor wire

in the Bialowieza Forest –

with its bison, moose, boar, lynx, wolf – the last vast

vestige of Europe’s great afforested plain,

after humankind’s relentless assartment.

This is the forest of the Battle

of Smolensk, the Katyn Massacre,

the Sobibor Extermination Camp.

Jews took refuge among the ancient trees.

Now others are seeking asylum

under the birch and the pine. The wall of wire

threatens all even ‘the fowls of the air’.

Probably before any one of us

had a name, definitely before countries

were imagined, and charts devised, there were

hours, days, weeks of forests of oak and spruce.

The trees lay where they fell. Multitudes

of insects flourished, and saplings grew.

Around the margins scattered people

gathered, hunted, respected everything

even the stones – and watched the brown bears in spring

grazing on the wild garlic under the trees.

Battle of SmolenskKatyn MassacreSobibor Extermination Camp