Hedge

It was a roadside corridor really,
a memory with business of its own,
the hedge meant a lot to me —
I wasn’t the only one.

It was a relic ribbon,
a cornucopia of shrub and tree,
creeper, moss, fungus, stone —
annals scrawled in correa, black gum, daisy —

bush, dogwood, sag. The hedge made fearless company
with the missing forest — not its ghost but living on —
bee hum and birdsong held the oral history
that fringed the bare hills. But that’s all gone —

before, forgiveness seemed a possibility,
now, unseen, unheard, abundance has gone to ground.