Armchair Critic

The speech the wind makes in the trees
Is many mock soliloquies:
A hundred actors playing Lear
To one spectator shut in here
On a sofa’s cushioned stuff
While the green room has it rough.
The one is many, in a storm
With scarce a limit, scarcely form,
But all is one, the one alone
Inside the hollow megaphone.
The tossing mane of foliage
Is stricken nature on the stage;
His upright trunk resists the gale
Nor suffers yet the saw and nail:
Concentric rings this actor’s lines
Uncut until the tree reclines.
Shaking his noble head the mast
Shall bring the storm to peace at last,
And all his peers at the same time
Shall bring the curtain down in rhyme
Of raindrops slipping through their leaves,
Which no-one now but me conceives.
The silent dripping actors stand
In a housed and sheltered land
But the homeless peeping out
From blankets put the end in doubt,
The speech the wind makes in the trees
Brings power lines to pylon’s knees
And in the theatre of fate
Nature weeps a wilder state.