Hedges

Hedges

Hedges often get cut back in the winter,  to avoid the bird nesting season.  It's also easier when the branches are bare of leaves,  but it makes the ugly cut branches so much more visible.  I was driving home along a country road when I came upon a hedge which had been cut particularly brutally,  which prompted this poem.

Winter, and rounding a bend
The flailed hedges, stripped of bark
Expose shattered white branches
Like fractured bones, exposed, raw,
Onto the roadside.
In time the stumps will heal
Shoots will repair, strengthen, bind
Weaving the hedge together
Hiding the shocking scars.
Branches may learn to grow upwards
Not outwards
To avoid the annual carnage.
For now I mourn
The indiscriminate brutality of the flail.


© Copyright 2018. Chris Auger. All Rights Reserved.

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