John Quicke

Patrington, Yorkshire, UK

John Quicke was a professor of education at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely in scholarly and professional journals, and has written several books (see Google Scholar). Many of his poems have been published in magazines and anthologies.

Poem written 27^th April 2020

THE ASH TREE

The grassy road ahead lies straight and dry,

so dry the earth churned up in recent floods

is almost white in its tractor sculpted form.

No worries here about droplets from another’s breath.

But wrestling with a cold wind in spring sunshine

sharpens a sense of risk, against my lighter feelings,

brings home concerns about the state we’re in,

calculable threats from plague to pollution.

I train my binoculars on the distant trees,

loving the instant clarity of things brought closer.

Today, I focus on a single ash tree,

note its black buds not yet bursting into leaf,

and instantly remember how last year,

while buzzards circled lazily over the church beyond,

I was on the look out for die-back, scanning

the branches from the top for tell-tale signs. 

Now, too early in the year, perhaps, to spot this,

but I am more fearful, keener to be genned up

on disease and its control, to know the facts –

spores carried on the wind, surviving on leaf litter

from felled trees, the infected ones incurable,

the final solution to allow death to run its course,

plant thousands, ban all imports, and breed

from resistant strains, then check

the heritability of tolerance…

unwanted media phrases stick in the mind.

‘Follow the science’, even the Latin, the ravages

of H.fraxineus, as a desperate way of putting things

outside myself, a more ‘objective frame of reference’,

but strangely doing the opposite, triggering

local associations, coming too close for comfort,

trying to cope with one grief after another.