Municipal GumBy Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Gumtree in the city street,Hard bitumen around your feet,

Rather you should beIn the cool world of leafy forest halls

And wild bird callsHere you seem to me

Like that poor cart-horseCastrated, broken, a thing wronged,

Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,Whose hung head and listless mien express

Its hopelessness.Municipal gum, it is dolorous

To see you thusSet in your black grass of bitumen—

O fellow citizen,What have they done to us?

Juxtaposition: The poet upsets our expectations by in the first line by putting “gum tree” alongside “city street” - an unusual place for a tree.

The imagery of the “hard bitumen around its feet” reminds me of trees I saw while living in Sydney and it is directly contrasted with the imagery of “cool”…”leafy forest halls”

Gumtree in the city street,Hard bitumen around your feet,

Rather you should beIn the cool world of leafy forest halls

And wild bird calls

Personification of the tree occurs with the use of ‘your feet’ to

describe the gum tress roots. By making the tree like a person, we respond with more empathy.

Simile - The poet uses an extended simile comparing the tree to a cart horse. Much like the tree, the horse is not the wild stallion running free, but has been captured, castrated and controlled in a way which is destroying it.

Here you seem to me Like that poor cart-horseCastrated, broken, a thing wronged,Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,Whose hung head and listless mien expressIts hopelessness.

I have chosen two images which represent the comparison made between the tree and the horse. Both images show the way that nature has been changed unnaturally by humans.

listless = without purpose mien= face

dolorous = saddening

Municipal gum, it is dolorousTo see you thusSet in your black grass of bitumen—O fellow citizen,What have they done to us?

In the final lines the poet uses personification again to make us see the tree not as a tree, not as an animal, but now a citizen.The beautiful contrast of “black grass of bitumen” and the final rhetorical question “What have they done to us?” leaves the reader thinking about the common bond we share with nature and how society’s actions make us both less than we should be. There is also something in this last line of the poet’s aboriginality, as she uses the tree as a metaphor for the plight of urban aboriginals.

A sea of city traffic winding home on a balmy Friday afternoon, a sea of geese honking incoherently on a bleak black river with bone white banks, architectured and manufactured manscape, where the natural ebb and flow of hill and dale has been swallowed under an ocean of concrete and glassI swim alone in that sea in my own fowl

metal capsule, struggling against the tide of red and orange lights, floundering my way home to kith and kin, dreaming in the stasis of the streetlights of sunsets far from here, vistas of varied hues and tones, horizons of granite and moss and the promise of icy streams and frosty fields and air so crisp you’d swear it had never been breathed before,

I suck in another breath of the recycled stench that has been exhaled again and again by machines big and small

and wonder again how we came to this.

City Traffic by David Dunlop