Pollarding Matt Gilbert

Matt Gilbert Pollarding

These surgeons do not wear white gowns or aprons, hair tied back, their patients will not be anaesthetised, standing tall through all incisions,

signalled with mechanic roars, preludes for the buzz, whine, thump, to come, as bark skin, sapwood, heartwood, feel the bite of metal teeth,

gnawing on over-reaching limbs, scraping passing buses, or threatening to snap, to slap a dog, or one of us, back into the ground - yet high regard is there, beneath hard hats

and headsets, lofty departing branches caressed by dangled legs, before the cutter brings them down, like patting a broken horse before a shot, admitting sentience through touch,

as the violence of the noise becomes the act: a shout, a keening, released to confess the size of sacrifice, from each shorn tree, each street-bound concrete forest soul, brought before the knife.