Council for the prosecution, your opening statement please

My Lord,

Members of the jury

My name is Red, Red Wood

I address the court on behalf of long line of Family Trees

I intend to demonstrate that mankind, down his lineage, has

Butchered and murdered millions of my fellow trees

Special branch twigged after a Bonsai witness report

A young tree by the name of Master S.A Pling

Later confirmed by an Alder statesman within the forest in question

Did witness him at the scene

Where the Horn beamed actual footage to my office

Which Hazel will now show the court?

It is no leafing matter

This footage will leaf you evergreen at the gills

This day was indeed very Black, Poplar it was not

Of a multiple murders, all severed at ankle

To compound maters many arms were lopped

Put through this huge grinding machine

Evidence conveniently lost amongst scatterings on a park

Where there are two types of bark

This heinous crime against nature was made it personal

When you took a band saw to a forest of my American cousins

Guess there won’t be any Redwood stages coming over that hill

Parts of me has been sliced into various sizes

Taken, used and abused by co-conspirators

Parts of me have ended up on a housing estate in Urmston

My Lord, please might I draw you attention to exhibits 1 to 10

Speaking to you as part of a Welsh Dresser and then

Having watched my fellow trees forcibly removed from homes

Denied the basic tree right to live within nature’s elements

Similarly discharged then the indignity of being glued and screwed

I believe that community service wood not go amiss

I demand that the last of my kind be used to punish this man

No more shall the Scots Pine for the loss of a wee bairn

It is the prosecution wish that the lot should be Silver Birched

For failing to replenish my species at a sufficient rate, reducing air quality

That he be buried alive using the last of my said kind (coughin).

Ensuring environmental justice and the last lath is on him,

Thank you my Lord Beecham

 

© Phil Golding 06/08