North Country, filled with gesturing wood, <br />With trees that fence, like archers' volleys, <br />The flanks of hidden valleys <br />Where nothing's left to hide <br /> <br />But verticals and perpendiculars, <br />Like rain gone wooden, fixed in falling, <br />Or fingers blindly feeling <br />For what nobody cares; <br /> <br />Or trunks of pewter, bangled by greedy death, <br />Stuck with black staghorns, quietly sucking, <br />And trees whose boughs go seeking, <br />And tress like broken teeth <br /> <br />With smoky antlers broken in the sky; <br />Or trunks that lie grotesquely rigid, <br />Like bodies blank and wretched <br />After a fool's battue, <br /> <br />As if they've secret ways of dying here <br />And secret places for their anguish <br />When boughs at last relinquish <br />Their clench of blowing air <br /> <br />But this gaunt country, filled with mills and saws, <br />With butter-works and railway-stations <br />And public institutions, <br />And scornful rumps of cows, <br /> <br />North Country, filled with gesturing wood– <br />Timber's the end it gives to branches, <br />Cut off in cubic inches, <br />Dripping red with blood. <br /><br /><br />Kenneth Slessor<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/north-country/
