Faith Features

Trees and the inspiration they bring to humans is the subject of three prize winning poems which celebrate the role they play in our everyday lives.

The 'Trees and the Spirit' competition, launched by the Council for Church and Society, focused on the importance of trees and their links with faith and theology.

Exeter Cathedral's former Poet-in-Residence, James Harpur, returned to the city in June 2008 to announce the three prize winners.

First prize went to James Turner from Exeter. His poem 'Campus Trees' juxtaposes the stresses of the modern technological world with the calmness of trees rooted in nature.

Trees inspire in many ways

Crediton resident Stephen Sims won second prize for his poem 'Spiky, with highlights or Zach seeks a tree with fleshy roots'. Third prize went to Exeter's Trevor Germon for his poem 'Wood that does not grow'.

The competition was part of a larger project called 'Roots of Inspiration', which explores the tree as an expression of God and as a source of art.

The theme was interpreted broadly and wasn't restricted to any particular religious or spiritual tradition.

Almost 70 entries were received and judges James Harpur and Christopher Southgate had the difficult task of choosing the winning entries.

Roots of Inspiration is a Council for Church and Society project which helps to spread the message that trees are important for the planet's ecology, human society and as a source of inspiring art and faith.

"It is so easy to take trees for granted, but without them human life would not have developed as it has," explained project co-ordinator Martyn Goss.

"They have provided us with materials for food, shelter, fuel, medicine and much more. They clean the air and hold water.

"Trees provide habitat for millions of other creatures, but they also have a grace and beauty of their own. They have both an intrinsic worth as well as pragmatic uses."

A new DVD depicting the links between trees and the Cathedral will be launched later this year.

The winning poem: The Campus Trees

Two hours trapped in a swipe-card space –
in a square-eyed soul-denying place
where twenty-four seven we sell off knowledge,
increase our customers' employability,
merge their brains with spoon-fed screens
whose steady glimmer opens onto
an endless virtuality –
an interface whose centre is everywhere
and whose circumscription is a landfill
of fast-food litter and discarded hardware
and please keep checking the website for updates –
a twenty-first century space where books
have lately begun to fade into
an old-hat past, and the latest taste
is multi-media suite, and enthusiasm
is compulsory like an avenue
of vending machines or twenty little
dark blue welcoming helium balloons
each with its fixture of rictus grin.

Two hours. Till eleven o'clock. Time
for George to slip away unnoticed –
come on! while it's still allowed! - to negotiate
the swing-doors, the easy-to-baffle
anti-theft alarms, to glide
across the campus grass to where the trees take over, leaf-shedders
and evergreens, holy sentinels, shade-providers,
squirrel-playgrounds, even the imported ones more rootedly here
than any(human)body. George
moves among them...
                                 Time's up! Soon
he's back at his desk, his brain re-merged
with his keyboard screen. But you can tell
he's been among the trees, just look
through the hole in his official surface
at their fissured fungus-sprouting trunks,
at the shapes they make of the spaces between,
crossed by magpie, blackbird, pigeon.
Sequoia, eucalyptus, chestnut:
trees, like birds, don't need their names,
nor care what day it is, or century.
Read the gestures their branches make.
See how they feather the distances, one
behind the other. They speak a silence
colossal, aloof, beyond the reach
of anything that can be known.

(by James Turner)