The trees came back, stronger than ever, bark hard with resistance to all our human classifications and imposed functionality, rejecting the binary of deciduous/evergreen, and having no truck with fuel or furniture. We eyed each other through a range of adverbs that shaded from haughtily to fearfully on the visible spectrum, then fringed into the ultraviolet and infrared, though even this brief assessment is fraught with anthropocentric assumptions, for what does a tree see, eh? We spoke our own languages and, as far as we could ascertain, we came to a shared understanding of how things go from here: we smug monkeys can, for a time, like it says in the Bible, hold dominion over the land, the sea, the birds of the air, the beasts that crawleth, and on and on, and whatever: and then we all die, and the trees – who, by the way, no longer accept the designation tree – will take it from there.
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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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