Introduction Page 3
Commenting on this volume, Judith Wright says that the poems were:
written at a time when it seemed as though at any moment the world
would be blown up and I felt that now is the time to have one's say or
never. The Two Fires was an attempt to state what I felt about the
atomic bomb....the bomb itself horrified me very deeply, because it
seemed to me that for the first time man was using thought - pure
thought, his own thought - to kill as many as possible of his fellow
creatures.3
"Gum-Trees Stripping" begins not with destructive "thought" but with
"saying": "say the need's born within the tree... say sap is tidal like the sea."
The mysterious "need" within the tree must be said. The life-force, moving like
the sea, must be said. But then, “wisdom shells the words away" and there is a
move from saying to watching: “watch this fountain slowed in air/ where sun
joins earth." Watching a "fountain slowed in air" slows the thinking process of
the previous lines, slows body and breathing into an attitude of waiting upon
"silent rituals".
The "place" is an ordinary forest of gum-trees. The poem sees this place and
one particular tree, in detail: “the red, the rose", the scars of fire; a meeting
place of sun and earth. This seeing penetrates to the inner life of the tree, to
the sap like the tide of life rising in "solstice-heat", waiting for a particular
moment of light to touch and set off a hidden "trigger", a signal announcing
and setting in motion the solemn ritual.
3 Interview by John Thompson, in Considerations. New Essays on Kenneth Slessor Judith Wright
and Douglas Stewart, Ed. Brian Kierman (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1977) p. 74
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