If I could be a tree, I’d be a sycamore

Its low-hanging branches are made for childhood adventures.

Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images

At the Q&A session after a poetry reading a few weeks ago, somebody wanted to know what kind of tree I’d be (“If you were a tree…”). I played for time, trying to think of a poetic answer, and that’s what I’ll do again for a moment – please bear with me.

Contrary to popular insistence, the role of poet laureate carries no obligations. The then prime minister Theresa May confirmed as much when she rang up to offer me the “job” (one of her happier tasks during her short and bumpy period in office, I assume). In 1843, Prime Minister Robert Peel, in urging William Wordsworth to take up the position, wrote: “You shall have nothing required of you.” And what’s good enough for Bill is good enough for me.

However, there are expectations. Some that I have of myself, and others that arrive via social media – often expecting me to write about the Middle East these days. By social media I mean Instagram, the only platform of its type that I use, and which I think of as a gallery rather than a communication tool, mostly because I don’t know which buttons to press. If I did respond to requests and messages, I’d point out that I have, in fact, posted a poem about Israel and Palestine called “The Holy Land”. Two problems, I guess. One: the poem didn’t wave a flag. (By “when will you write a poem about x”, people usually mean when will you write a poem for us, and I’m always reminded of Seamus Heaney’s square-jawed reply: “If I do write something,/Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself”.) And two: it was about a tree. The one felled in the Hadrian’s Wall gap to be precise, at the time when the culprit was thought to be a young lad. Its subject was forgiveness. Showing mercy in the face of violence and destruction – is that on-message enough?

I must have passed that tree in 2010 when I walked the Pennine Way but never noticed it, possibly because I’d seen it within the oncoming view of the path rather than from a perspective that framed it between two hills. Or, more likely, because it was a sycamore. In my part of the world, sycamores are so numerous and so fertile they’re often described as weeds. Last year, after a scarily hot spring, the gutters and drains around the house were completely clogged with the fruits. The conjoined seed propellers would make an excellent insignia for a more environmentally conscious airline, if such a thing could realistically exist, and I’ve always thought that ailing helicopters could learn from the way they make their graceful emergency landings.

Some people refer to the sycamore as the hanging tree, because its strong lower limbs make convenient and dependable gibbets. Others know not to park below them in the sticky season, especially in open-top roadsters – not a problem I’ve had to grapple with. When the wind ruffles the khaki leaves their lighter undersides come into view, as if the trees are swishing their petticoats. The bark can be dark and slimy when wet but like a smooth silvery hide in the sun, one that lends itself to teenage graffiti.

A few weeks ago I walked to the top of a local field to see the sycamore that was our gang headquarters when we were kids. We’d drape football scarves from the branches, set up rope swings, loll about in its rigging. On the edge of the barren moor there was something implausible not just about its tallness and fullness but about its very existence. The tree, though, has been felled. Where it once shoved up out of the banking there’s just a severed trunk with mossy stumps around its flanks. What was a strong hydra of a being is now a multiple amputee with little sign of regrowth. Posing no danger, I can only think it was an eyesore to someone in the terrace below, so was chopped.

That’s the tree I’d be, that common or garden but proud sycamore, stepladder to the sky, its big arms full of the future.

[See also: The secrets of the heath]