THIS IS THE POEM THAT WAS READ AT JOHN'S FUNERAL. IT WAS A FAVOURITE PLACE. POOKS HILL (BATEMANS AND BURWASH) ARE IN THE HIGH WEALD, EAST SUSSEX...

Under the Tree, Pooks Hill


ian said to John that we didn't belong

and this peace was provided by what we were on

with his back to the beech tree the loggers worked round

when they cleared the plantation and opened the ground

that we crossed from the path leading back to the car

where the songbirds still sang tho their wood was no more than a memory


the sun set a tree in the distance on fire

silvering the brambles like living barbed wire

it shone on the fern fronds that covered the ridge

on the craters and trenches the pine branches bridged

and I thought back at ian: name the peace you can see

it's a world war one landscape apart from this tree we are under


Terry placed a branch on the fire he'd begun

invisible flames in the rays of the sun

and we watched how the gnats circled up in its smoke

spiralling in a fury like house dust on coke

on an island of calm in a sea of debris

wrecked on the shores of our own world tree roasting chestnuts


and I noticed a Holly twixt the heels of my boots

the smallest of saplings in a bay of its roots

from a leaf of which blew out a gossamer thread

the spider that spun it being absent or dead

ot was glinting half-seen as it wavered in flight

a broken guitar string in the sun's golden light shining on us


hardy wrote the poem of the horse and the Plough

dickens of a London that's built over now

and the post man woke coverage from an opium dream

when this tree wasn't nearly so broad in the beam

now it grows on its own and it's filled out this space

so it looks like three separate trees joined at the waist on this hillside


and below in the valley the mansion stands still

in which rudyard kipling wrote puck of Pooks hill

at a desk by the window with crossworks of lead

as he thought up the story I still haven't read

though I've come here so often like him I suppose

when this tree was a part of the wildwood he chose for a setting


a pinewood instead will be grown before long

maybe next time it's cut down the tree will be gone

just a stump in the darkness with growth rings revealed

like the grooves of a record the pine needles shield

and the six of us too when our lives are complete

me ian and Terry and John al and pete with our stories