Poetry: Cherry Tree by Tamara von Werthern

 

Cherry Tree

 

There’s a cherry tree in my local park

That looks like a cloud on a stick

And every time I pass it these days

Someone’s phone is clicking away

 

To store it for later, for the dry empty days

Entirely locked up indoors, when spring

Has been banished, and Nature officially

Banned, and we are preserved inside our cells

 

Awaiting a clean new world, a fresh new start

All through the winter, we’ve waited for spring

And now it’s arrived, it’s been snatched away

To be looked at on screens, smelt from behind masks

 

It is a crying shame.

 

Tamara von Werthern is an award-winning playwright based in Hackney.

You can read more about the success of her dystopian short film, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, here.

Her play The White Bike, and climate change book Letters to the Earth, featuring her contribution, are available at Pages of Hackney bookshop on Lower Clapton Road, which is currently closed but still selling book tokens.