Forest Poetry

“Thank you so much for booking on to our Creative Writing Workshop at Abriachan Forest Trust tomorrow (March 13th). Please bring your usual writing materials (be that pad and pen or laptop) and some warm/waterproof clothing in case we want to take a wander round the grounds for inspiration.”

It’s not the first time I have been to Abriachan Forest and written poetry in the forest classroom. It’s not the first time either that I have driven up the steep hill with its winding road, single track and passing places. It’s not the first time I missed the turning and had to turn around. I was the first time that I have taken a travel sick friend with me and pulled over into farm gateways for fresh air stops every so often.

The warm and waterproof clothing was not required. It was wet and windy and no one suggested a walk around the place for inspiration. We had all we needed with poems to oil the creative wheels, a warm stove blasting out heat, a pot of tea and a tin of biscuits.

The workshop – the Jessie Kesson Workshop began at 2.00.  It was lead, not by Jessie, but someone who had won an award and is poet in residence at Moniack Mhor Writing Centre just outside of Inverness.

Extracts from “The Wild Bird Passes” provided our first task – picking phases from her work and weaving them into our own prose or poetry.

I reach the dark heart of the forest. Trees crowd together, shoulder to shoulder, blocking out light. The air tastes dry and musty. Ancient trees, not willing to bow, loom high. There’s little colour, no bright green of moss, no red flash of wild flower. Brown parades a thousand shades. And silence – no bird song erupts in the quiet, only the low moan and slow creak of trees as the air stirs.  Unseen eyes watch and a vague sense of threat strokes my skin.

I might read a lot of poetry, and write a lot, but I don’t always understand it. We read through “The Wood Pile” by Robert Frost. It’s set in a forest. There’s a bird flying about. There’s a wood pile. It’s not a recently felled tree chopped up. I have seen enough woodpiles in my time, in various forests dotted about the Inverness district. It didn’t really occur to me to question why the wood pile was apparently forgotten. Other workshop attendees suggested the woodcutter had died. Here’s my take on it:-

The Wood-Pile

This wood pile,

One of many,

Not forgotten,

But seasoning,

Dreams of the table,

The chair, the crib

In the next life

Craft, the best of

Skill and fashioning

Takes time

Patience and waiting

Too soon

Too new from the felling

And the wood splits

And splinters

But the waitng,

Waiting, waiting

Seems endless

There’s a second verse which I like less and will work on, maybe. In it another wood pile dreams of a fire and flames and a stove. I’m not sure it’s needed or adds anything to the poem. The thing about poetry is that you can give a voice to things that don’t have one.

Our third prompt was from Sorely MacLean’s poem “Hallaig”. There is something that I find stirring about Gaelic – both written and read. There was no one to read the Gaelic version. Yet again I’m not sure I understood what was going on. There were lots of place names, and people names with too many consonants and not enough vowels but we stumbled through them.  Writing from the viewpoint of tree was a challenge. What do trees see? What changes do they live through? What commentary might they make of the short life span of fleeting forms?

I’m not posting my poem. Polished up a bit, it might be submitted to a competition. I loved the work of some of the other writers there. My friend, my travel sick companion, wrote a lovely poem. The tree, standing tall, was thinking about the seeds it had sent out, whether it had sired a forest or not.

It was a good couple of hours, not too many people to make you feel threatened, not too few to make you wonder why no one else was there. It was a comfortable environment to share and everyone was very encouraging. There was talk of setting up a regular creative writing group at Abriachan. Count me out. Much as I love poetry, I don’t love winding uphill roads, single track with passing places.

The homeward journey was easier to navigate but we stopped often to settle unsettled stomachs along the way.  I’m not sure if the unsettled stomachs are indicative of bad driving, bad roads or bad digestive systems – or a combination of all three. Keeping up a conversations didn’t seem to help.

It was nice to let someone else lead a workshop. Saturday is looming and Breathe Writers are meeting at the Bike Shed. Pencils and paper at the ready…

AFT

I have had a really wonderful weekend.  It was a birthday treat from my husband – two days of plenty of stimulation, opportunities to write and constructive feedback from experts.

Day One was spent with the ladies at the Abriachan Forest Trust.  While I might have textbooks and dictionaries on the bookshelves at work, they have a stuffed badger, a variety of empty wasp nests, skulls and antlers on theirs. Where I have four walls, a selection of windows and a door they have 534 hectares of forest.

After a short writing exercise to warm up the creative juices, we were taken on a very slow walk through a kissing gate and along a forest path.  We went just a few hundred yards but it took a hour and a half.  Commentary ranged from naming trees to identifying the particular variety of lichen on the branches.  Every aspect of managing the forest was explained, not through looking at pictures in a book, but by wading through bracken and touching things.  Even the poo from a pine martin was unravelled with a twig,

It was more than fascinating.  I envied them their knowledge of nature and their interaction with it.  I felt almost ashamed that I knew so little.  I spent my childhood in a rural village, but spent far too much time re-enacting scenes from “Captain Scarlett” and not enough learning about the flora and fauna around me.

The first poem sprang from a phrase that echoed in my head. “It’s like learning a foreign language.” 

The Forest

I confuse wild cherries with willows

And mix up bark and bud

As I learn the language

Of a forest

I stumble over the nuances

Of celandine and buttercups

The young oak

Refuses to surrender

Its brown leaves

But the words I have learnt

Slip away on the breeze

Despite an introduction to different trees the knowledge was not transferable.  Just because I was told “this tree is a birch”, I didn’t seem to be able to recognise the other birch trees in the forest.

The conversation moved on to badgers.  A nearby slope was home to a badger set or two.  We had to take their word for it as we didn’t see any.

The conversation moved on to bikers.  Mountain bikers have made their own trails down the hill.  The women recognised that the forest is not theirs.  They have to share it with other groups of people.  They didn’t mind the bikers hurtling down the hill, but talked to them of places to avoid.  Bluebells barely above ground had been mown down and newly planted saplings had been knocked over.  They could have waggled a finger and spoken harshly but chose to talk to the bikers and offer advice about minimising the damage.

I hadn’t realised the conversation had moved on from the badgers.  Apparently the bikers can hurtle from the top of the hill to the bottom in four minutes.  Badgers? Thought I. Moving that quickly? I wasn’t the only one to miss the change in the conversation. The picture in my head demanded a poem.

The Badger Run

At midnight the badgers

dash down the hill

Leaping the boulders,

through bracken they spill

From top to the bottom,

In four minutes flat

I stand in awe of

Achievements like that

I missed having my husband walking beside me.  The idea of writing anything and sharing it with others brings him out in a cold sweat.  He would have liked the walk.  He would have liked the kissing gate.  Everyone would have been lined up and told to kiss the person coming through the gate.  He would have demonstrated with me.

Curious them that the gate prompted such a sad poem.   I tried to force the poem to be positive and uplifting but it wouldn’t cooperate.  I was at pains later to tell people that it was not about me and my husband.  We haven’t stopped kissing – at gates or in other places. Showing the poem to Joe when I came home, I was at pains to insist it wasn’t biographical.

No More Kissing

We have stopped kissing - you and I

Our life together - left to die

Trails we followed now overgrown

I hew through bramble knots alone

I really enjoyed the first day of the weekend.  The weather wasn’t great.  A little bit on the windy side. It was only as I was leaving the car park at the Forest Trust that I read the notice NOT to park in the car park.  High winds were felling tall thin trees and nowhere was really safe.  All that was missing was the giant and the giant’s bowling ball as far as the landscape went.  They were planning to take down some of the trees, but the wind got there first and didn’t consult them on the ones that needed to come down.

I shall never look at a forest path and ignore the trees around me.  In fact I shall buy a book of trees so I know what to look for in buds and bark and leaf shapes.

The variety of things and how they all live together in one space is so fascinating.  I see God’s finger prints everywhere.