1st Prize: Stacey Forbes
Speaking of trees
For Suzanne and Peter
Suzanne Simard, Forest Ecologist, and Peter Wohlleben, Forester, have been admonished
to carefully consider the language they use to describe trees and fungi, as any implication
that a forest may be in some way sentient makes the scientific world uncomfortable.
Whatever you do, don’t say the trees are communicating.
It’s only science. Follow the molecules moving through mycorrhizal networks –
filaments of fungi transmitting carbon, water, and warnings of danger from tree
to tree. This connection keeps the forest alive. Nothing more.
Never tell anyone that forests – like elephants – care for their dead.
Just the facts: you found the five-foot stump of a beech tree felled four hundred
years ago and cut into the bark to see what was inside. Don’t read into what you
uncovered: chlorophyl, green as a seedling in spring – and roots still feeding on
sugar the trees around it continued to pump in for centuries after it fell. The forest
could not know a matriarch still has her place in this world, and must live.
Please don’t say mother tree or kin recognition.
Just because the oldest birch in the wood, having absorbed more sunlight and
soil and rain and fire and ash than all the others nourishes every tree it can reach,
feeding its own offspring first. Don’t dream what it’s learned of burning and
breathing and seed – don’t think it teaches the sapling how to resist being eaten
alive by small things. Only disclose that slow-pulsing electrical signals are sent
through a circuit of thread – and answered through knots of familial roots no
hands could untangle.
Don’t refer to the mushrooms as magic.
Though doctors say some mushrooms have been known to remap neural pathways
in the human brain. A man who suffered the swings of bipolar disorder returns to
his center and sleeps peacefully. Lives peacefully. Don’t say the mushrooms are
mystic or medicine just because they helped a woman with late-stage cancer face
death unafraid. Tell no one that she connected somehow to the earth’s healing core,
and was cured.
Don’t tell the world you have found forest wisdom.
Do not expect the civilized world to believe these beings that never knew heart
or hearing or tongue have found more to say to each other – and more ways to
say it – than we have. Don’t repeat that the earth’s deepest wisdom is held in the
open limbs of trees and the whispering world of fungi under our feet. Do not tell
your truth, or the world we have made – enlightened, alone, fractured by fault lines
of riot or silence – may say you are mad.
2nd Prize: Rose Proudfoot
House Which Sank
I grew up in a town that was sinking; it had
been sinking for a long time, parts were gone,
parts were partly gone, it’s still sinking now.
Sunken teachers from our sinking school took us
to The Salt Museum, a small curiosity, acting
mouthpiece of a town trying to explain itself.
We watched a long video in a saline room
about the vital role of salt in our town’s history; the
mines, the floods, the grit, the brine and blood.
There were big lumps of rock salt, if you were
sneaky you could lick them, away from the sunken
eyes of The Salt Museum’s sinking employees.
Tiny model men sweat in a replica mine, they hoped
for coal but hit salt and everything changed; sifting
pans, salt-sore workers, grinding heat and flames.
On the wall a sign told us how many men died, how
progress slowed so they flooded the tunnels to pump
out brine, and houses all over town slid into the ground.
In a display unit there was an old photograph:
‘House which sank in 1892’. The house was on a crazy
angle, slumped, as though pulled by its hair from behind,
eyes rolling backwards in its frame,
foundations exposed like an underskirt,
windows towards the sky.
Men lined up, hanging off the building’s shell,
faces of dark rage, actorly, the house resembling
a prop in a play, a flat trick at the back of a stage.
The men in the photograph all looked at me
through the backlit screen, hovering outside the
house which sank like displaced spirits seeping
from broken beams. The house was sinking,
it had been sinking for a long time, then while the
children slept the mines opened their mouths,
those jewelled lips, encrusted with salt crystals,
as the whole house tipped. When a house goes under,
men are thrown out like heavy cargo to pose for photos.
I walked home from school, destabilised, pavements less
sure than before, the men’s faces paling, turning blank in
my mind. I had a sinking feeling but still turned the key;
found my dad on the strangest slant, and a carpet of salt at my feet.
3rd Prize: Sarah Wimbush
Shelling Peas with my Grandmother in The Gorgiolands
Never be surprised what gorgios say. Never mention Daddy
juggled pennies on the back of a donkey,
that Liza married the son of a king,
or how Gentle Hugh received the Mons Star, posthumously.
Don’t point out the in-between places. Don’t speak
of the love of a deadwood fire, and pretty-wear,
or how bare-knuckle fighting is as much a part of who you are
as something they call ‘class’. Never tell anyone
when the visions come, or that you collect dead
women’s earrings or that you have always been frightened of water,
except during a thunderstorm, when you stand
at the lane end and burn like a flame in a lantern.
Never smoke a pipe until you’re at least ten and steer clear
of them North Country folk with their hob-cobbled jib.
Never go to the fields in your grubbers,
wear a skirt and change behind a tree, and never ever let the lass
next to you pull peas quicker than you.
Never kiss a lad - you’ll get in the family way,
and never get in the family way unless he’ll do a runner, together.
After, he’s to torch the bender, straw ticks, corrupt linen.
Never allow jukels inside the vardo,
or boil shimmies with pudding cloths, or leave a wound to turn –
rinse with your own water or bind in a spider’s web.
Never chor what does not belong to you, or God,
and you’ll do well my girl, to be match and master both
with your old fella. Always keep one boot on the ground,
tell your children’s children their blood names,
and if, one day, you’re in the company of gorgios,
mind when to leave the book of your mouth open,
when to fold it into a crossed knife.
gorgio non-Traveller; bender tent; jukels dogs; chor take