ANDREW Young, the Elgin-born poet and cleric, wrote with perception and originality about the natural world in its many manifestations. Here, he talks to trees, not aloud but in an inner monologue. The two pieces come from his Selected Poems (Carcanet, £9.95).

THE TREE

Tree, lend me this root,

That I may sit here at your foot

And watch these hawking flies that wheel

And perch on the air’s hand

And red-thighed bees

That fan the dust with their wings’ breeze.

Do you not feel me on your heel,

My bone against your bone?

Or are you in such slumber sunk,

Woodpeckers knocking at your trunk

Find you are not at home?

To winds you are not dumb;

Then tell me, if you understand:

When your thick timber has been hewn,

Its boards in floors and fences sewn,

And you no more a tree,

Where will your dryad be?

THE FALLEN TREE

The shade once swept about your boughs

Quietly obsequious

To the time-keeping sun;

Now, a fallen tree, you with that shade are one.

From chalky earth as white as surf

Beneath the uptorn turf

Roots hang in empty space

Like snakes about the pale Medusa’s face.

And as I perch on a forked branch,

More used to squirrel’s haunch,

I think how dead you are,

More dead than upright post or fence or chair.