Aesculus Hippocastanum and the Barn owl

The flower symbol of Kiev
The capital of Ukraine
KIER A developer
With quite a lot to gain
Four beautiful flowering
Conker trees
Offering bounteous shade
Growing in a rich green veld
Where wildness had been laid

A thing of beauty and of joy
Not only Keats could see
The earth
but any poet
Or sensitive could free
The worth of whom was clearly
Apley woods adjacent to
A plot picked out
To be redesigned
now throughtfully and true

Which truthfully in my stomach
That suggestion made me balk
And I just felt somewhat blinkered
To hear that lime trees walk
was the fresh proposal
new houses for those who
Wanted to live in nature
Which many of you do
The expanse of rough grass
A Home to life forms small
A rich mosaic of creatures
All Missing after the trawl
The destruction of so many
Along with the wondrous trees
And a barn owl clothed in splendour
Despite its rasping plea’s

The heart faced phantom
Clearly was sleeping deeply
When
The arborists and their
Chipper rolled up
And the two men
Began the job of
Cutting into my trunk
I could feel
The agony of the ages
For me it was so real

I had harboured many brothers
and sisters
Of the field
Bees came in their masses
With brick red pollen yield
In rough grass barn owls
Hunt at night
Their long legs where they be
Catching voles and mice
In their sweet reverie

And all my flowers and fruits
Would now be at an end
No more
All that shade and colour
I knew what it was for
To brighten and to add
Sweet notes
to the oxygen on high
To be shared around the sensitives
Who often wandered by

I was sacrificed my life force
Broken on that day
Developers developing
Wanted me out of the way
Turned me over to the wreckers
Who rapidly employ
Diggers tearing up the meadow
And with it all the joy
All those tiny insects
That many fail to see
Or care about
Are part of life
Of the fabric
That is key

To what is the perfect
countryside
For people to admire
Standing through all weathers
And bearing hail and fire
From peacefulness to desolation
A man made sophistry
Ringed with Limes
That will be saved
Thanks to the people we

Who filmed this actuality
The essential nature where
What had appeared undying
And immortal saw despair
A symphony of colour
Became an emptiness
In many ways
An erasure of the true
We do confess
It nullified and wiped out
All of nature in one swoop
Holding back the tears
We feel for you
As we fly the coop

The life force at an end
So quickly vanished
All that living matter
All those miracles unseen
Tangible and considerable
That splendid park of green
And now it is a mud bowl
Sparse and meagre where we
Can realize the future
And the absurdity

4 sentries sawn and thrown away
Our wood does not burn free
Its splutters in the fire place
And its not wood that can be
Used to make a profit with
Just a wasted incarnation
In the wrong place at the wrong time
Perhaps a short cremation

The relatedness of our being
Our respect and our concern
A barn owl she just managed
To fly away to turn
Sideways and just to escape
The pickle she was in
a dilemma close to death for her
Leapt clean out of her skin
Having a unique kinship
With the tree perhaps we know
The arborists the developer
The planners they all grow
To re-design the perfect
With a sameness to before
Except its indistinguishable
Than the many many more
Its a world of exclusivity
And discord I will say
Poles apart from what was
There
The light the softer play
The variance each nuance
That faifthful image we
Which Seemed so seemingly perceptive
To the butterfly and bee

Its never restoration
No compensation we
Who knew the former beauty
Just try simplicity
But impossible to replicate
With artifical grass
With bricks and concrete
And tarmac roads
If its alright with you
I pass

And now ofcourse a separation
An undoing where we see
An incoherence a rupture
Adrift in a hostile sea
Unfinished a down payment
In progress shall we say
An embryo, of what though
Disorder imbroglio

We can see the grassy scriptures
In our minds eye
How we shared
The air with the dog walkers
And the others that all dared
To be themselves to stay put
Where creation made it so
Until man un kind thought
better of it
As many of you know.

What I see before me
Is a travesty alas
A beautiful peaceful
Countryside
An urbanized morass
Their spread will mushroom
Outwards no doubt
Before to long
And take more of the Apley
Woods
Which will again be wrong