Nature Reclaims

What is true nature in those places and
Sometimes whole countries where it has endured
Control, transformation and destruction
By millenia of human intervention?

Is nature still nature when altered
By manipulation of people like
Their turning of wild wolves into tame dogs?

The saddest yet eerily serene sights
Are of human slash, burn and abandon.
Three great power stations in a line
Each three miles apart in a mimicry
Of medieval cathedrals and castles
Which overlooked the ancient landscape.

Belching smoke, the largest is infamous
As the greatest creator of greenhouse gases
In Western Europe. Yet the air of death
And abandonment hovers over them.

The coal mines that fed them have been closed
Leaving grassed over slag heaps in small towns
And villages where few have any work.

Nature has begun its reclamation.
Rabbits, pheasants, deer have reappeared.
So like Chernobyl. Only more modest
And gradual like Daniel Defoe's
London after the bubonic plague.

The power stations try hopelessly
To survive by burning willow.
The large flat fields are turned to the growing
Of plantations of this disregarded tree.

Willow- the rats of vegetation-
Are so beautiful as the genus that
Weeps over rivers, canals and gardens.
The common type, itself a source of
Catkins and the shiny, straight young stems that
Are beloved by flower arrangers,
Is irresistible to goats which stand on
Their hind legs to devour the highest leaves.

It has reverted to a weed, growing
Rapidly, but marshalled into long rows.
As it departs infancy, it becomes
Straggly and ugly like those beautiful
Children who turn into the adults you
Would routinely cross the road to avoid.

A few birds welcome this environment.
Most avoid. Startled I stand and look
At a rare turtle dove on a tree branch.
It returns my steady stare. Two species
Now foreign to the landscape, pitying each other.

A calming place, when devoid of the people
Who engineered it. Their irrelevance
Pointed by a great sky now clearing of smoke.
Humans controlling then deserting
Is the essence of its anomalous charm.