The Moses Tree From the tangle of its roots, To the nests in its hair The tree blazed white and blue. And the tree sang the Lord’s name in flame until roots and hair had turned to ash.

When He Planted in the Earth When He planted in the earth a tree of life, a tree of death (the latter with a curse of woe) did God say that this was good? And when He placed upon the grass the serpent Satan and his crew, did He ever stop to think why the Devil envied God? When Adam spied inside the bower that Eve was naked and alone, Was it Satan, was it God Who put the worm in Adam’s blood? And when God wept and cried some more inside a cloud of smoke and gas, was it then he

Mast/Tree The piling up of words into units, struc- tures, towers, is what might be termed the phallic unity of lang- uage. It was Hulme who said words ought to ‘stand up’ so that a poem is like a tree when the leaves are cut off -- it ‘be- comes a mast’.

Tree, 1943 My roots are split & my bone-bare branches brittle. I degenerate in a cruciformed landscape. There are many like me. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times. Woodcutter says we’ve been marked out for timber or burning. The genus, it seems, is being hewn.

A Twisted Tree A twisted tree from sapling green to creek-brown god, nature's will has bent its back, perversed its proper shape: Roots that will not hold, leaves that cannot bud, encircled by the serpent snake -- a canker in the lifemilk's sap, and in the viper's blood.

The Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline Project And again: the thud of executions echoes in the green ear of Maboula, Cameroon. The tremendous squeak of the assassin's blow and the axe cleaves the trunk: the first bite travels down the core like electricity through bone. The wood rings out dull music, a drowsy monotone. A loud creak and the sky topples; a tearing tumult of raindrops, leaves and twigs. Upper kingdoms are disturbed: birds disperse and disappear with the passing clou