Artwork: Nothing Permanent 33 by Gill Robinson

Garden Walking
Gina Wisker

Who are the ones who walk always beside me?
in the past, deep past and present?
Who the dark figures in the indecipherable night?
How easy in this tangle does a stranger become a friend, a friend a stranger ,
a fox become a tree , a tree, a fox ?
Do we move forwards? Are we in step? or only haunted variants locked, circling, going nowhere?

In other moments, ghosting myself, I turn to see another, not leaving,
still there, in that golden space.
If I write over and over and over myself, a palimpsest
of tangled memories
perhaps
in time something appears, something woven, knotted into something, planned and linked,
past to present to future . It does not have to be permanent ,
evolving would do, flowering, bearing leaves
creatively unfinished

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Artwork: Nothing Permanent 37 by Gill Robinson

Words Trees Destruction
Gina Wisker

The first time they came for the trees was pure aggression, dumb,
violating with axe and cutters on my side of the fence,
cruelly brutalising the living trees.
I am haunted by the skirls and cries of hired hands, entering the back gate,
desecrating
the plum, the eucalyptus, and the apple for more concrete and another shut shed.

This time they came with calculation, false research,
a hatred of my sycamore, my good, my lovely tree, older than all our precarious worlds planted hundreds of years ago on hospital soil.
They’d watched with loathing, welded to their seats, as it soars, nurturing the busy nesting birds, calming the roar of traffic, keeping the boundary, keeping the wild.
They came with clipboards, scientific probes. They came with nonsense wording and the same entitled loathing, leering angrily, over the fence, intent
on the destruction of living continuities.
Coming with meanness, chainsaws.
Deadlock.
Only my words are keeping them back. Only the tangled complex phrasing holds them off. They're waiting, they're biding their time, but so am I.
Mark my words here. This something will be permanent.
Harm not the trees.
(With thanks to Charlotte Mew ‘The Trees Are Down’)

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Artwork: Nothing Permanent 38 by Gill Robinson

Late February. Transitions.
Gina Wisker

Note just today the garden, windy, littered with winter's leaves and now
with spring bird calls.
Three decades of this garden
of these struggling plants, bent double, shrunk in each new dose of winter.
Three decades, each spring,
of the flowers awakening, of the birds singing once more with certainty, the trees stretching their limbs to leaves.
From my window, writing, I observe the magpies selecting loose waste strands for nesting, the squirrels arguing, noisily contesting space.
It’s Sunday.
Around this little tangled island tomorrow, again, the drilling and the crashing will
continue the destruction, building the money making mindless extensions, continue
the march over ancient fields and settlements.

In this hard won, hard protected island of wild
my garden sits precarious
surrounded
by a growing concretescape of planned estates stretching
from wood to wood.

One day the march of diggers paused revealing, briefly – a Bronze Age settlement
emerging from a farmer's field.
The sacred contents of the ancient circular burial ground
the femurs, skulls, and brooches
reminding us of permanence and loss.
Briefly neighbourly some visited and stood in awe.
But nothing’s permanent: not the treasures of the past, not even the sanctified ground.
So, measured, labelled, its treasures, managed, were removed
to boxes dusty in the archaeological museum. They’re stored as evidence,
as trophies of the past.

Sometimes I feel them watching
the ancient three together, fading.
Caught in a circle, wandering from hillsides at the march of buildings.
They’re watching from the Gog Magogs; named for legendary giants,
the only slight declivity in the flat, green fields and built up expensive developments predating on the pre-Roman ancient.

The sirens cry into the night.
The bulldozer runs its engine, impatient to begin again the
digging, smashing, paving over history, field and ancient land,
planting and growing only the concretescape.
In it for the build, then gone.
These are the property developers’ construction dreams.
With their hard hats and their planning boards they’re scouting the skyline, eyeing up the fields to Wandlebury and the Gog Magogs.
Profit and loss.
Nothing permanent.