Murky green fields hugging the main road meant five minutes til home.

The mammoth of an oak in the centre towered solitary; established. That

solid oak was massacred three years ago, cut down to a low stump,

great metal feeding troughs nailed to its exposed carcass.  

My pang of grief at the earth’s gaping wound is reinforced by Dad, his

curses flung at ‘Mr Fucking Farmer’ hovering stagnant between us. 

Hills blanketed in vibrant forests kept me still; settled. 

At age five, those forests were suspended in time, dreams in deep slumber.

Coillte began to cut perfect squares of woodland just as I turned ten; by

fifteen the rows of pine marching up the hills felt less like new growth,

and more like an invasion. Now, Dad and I walk through those woods, and

scorn fills the air before us, alongside our billowing breath. 

The riverside across from the bustling roundabout is bordered by towering trees, old

and noble, a barrier from the car horns and exhaust. The wall beyond those giants

encloses what once seemed a fairy land for eight-year-old me. On Dad’s shoulders. I

would crane my neck to marvel at those giants, all verging on a century old. Now I

compare a century to the millennium that the riverside giants hold in their roots, and

isn’t a century a meagre thing, compared to the Elder trees that would have stood in the

space occupied by a. Eucalyptus Muelleriana, dragged here from Australia.

There is a scraggy beach that stays barely visible during the evening summer tides,

and a dead tree, fossilised and pale, once lay on the furthest point of the peninsula.

When I was just about still a child, this dead tree was my pirate ship, my raft after a wreck,

And one day in winter, I looked at the empty space that once held my dead tree,

as Dad spat poison towards the landowner who neighboured my little peninsula.

With his pristine stables, his pollution in the river, the harbour,

his cement poured into our hedgerow shortcut,

the new pile of firewood lining the outside wall of his stark white house. 

I stopped playing pirates and shipwrecks after that.

The pretending seemed pointless.