Ashes to ashes

In Competition No. 2775 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of the ash.

A bleak topic for a comp, perhaps, but happily there are those who reckon that it is too early to start preparing the obituaries. Clive Anderson, president of the Woodland Trust, believes the species may well rise again. He writes: ‘Great stands of ash trees will be lost today, but they can grow back tomorrow,’ a hope echoed in what was a large and impressive entry. Commendations to David Silverman, G.M. Davis, Mary McLean and Roger Theobald. The winners below take £25 each, except for D.A. Prince, who pockets £30.
 

Too large for our imaginings, those bare
And hollowed landscapes where the ash once stood
In singing groves, or straggling hedgerows where
Tall saplings slowly thickened to a wood.
So, start with one familiar ash, a tree
From your own skyline, from your morning view
Through every season with its neighbourly
Reminder of the weather passing through
Its branches, bare or breaking into leaf,
Whose shifting play has scattered pools of shade,
Whose autumn gold is rendered far too brief
By the first lick of frost, whose keys displayed
A lust for living on. Now, multiply
One tree by hundreds, thousands, till they’re gone.
Once-sheltered valleys opened to the sky;
The mourning of the many starts with one.
D.A. Prince
 
Before man’s predecessors first took form,
Enduring ash trees flourished on the earth.
Their kind died more than once and was reborn,
Survived millennia to prove its worth.
Through ice and drought and flood and lightning strike
The keys to life, their seeds, lay safe and sound
Till new conditions let them germinate
And spread their roots in freshly fertile ground.
We mourn their loss, their usefulness and grace,
Their old mythology, their magic powers.
Leaves crumble, dead limbs fall to mark their space
In woods and parks across this land of ours.