IWE Online mourns the passing of Gieve Patel (b. 1940), poet and playwright, on 3 November 2023. Besides being a poet, the versatile Patel was also a physician, painter and sculptor. His collections include How Do You Withstand Body?, Mirrored, Mirroring and On Killing a Tree. Weaving medical imagery into poems such as ‘Post-Mortem’, Patel wrote of the act wherein
all these insides
That have for a lifetime
Raged and strained to understand
Be dumped back into the body,
Now stitched to perfection,
Before announcing death
Due to an obscure reason
In one of his most famous poems, ‘On Killing a Tree’, he offered a contrast to the human’s post-mortem, showing that ‘it takes much time to kill a tree’, then going through the stages of its extermination, until the tree finally dies:
The root is to be pulled out –
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out – snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.
Then the matter
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,
And then it is done.