The war of the environment
is evident in these hardened harsher climes,
where cramped and clinging trees are found encamped on hardy ground,
pressed into the earth, disparate in the decay, messed in disarray
like unshaven whiskers on the jowls of the soil.

Jostled amid the elements
by swinging storms, wring wringing wind and rampaged by rain
weaving swathes of stubble with the blunted razor of water raging
through the terrain to leave a maze of lustre and bluster behind.

The fittest are the freshest,
regeneration surging separately,
with the desire to merge together in a strangled survival,
an acknowledgement that hope belongs alongside the damage and the despair.