Vita longa et felix
For centuries I lifted my branches into the weather –
before the first arrow was loosed in Sherwood, before Robin Hood became a man, a legend, a shadow carried through the green.
I endured the Lionheart’s crusade, the plague bells, the Reformation’s broken altars, the fires that consumed women called witches.
The Renaissance opened its bright, questioning eyes. Napoleon marched across maps. On the Western Front, men vanished into mud, and later the Luftwaffe passed over England with its dark cargo of fire.
I watched two mustaches rise beneath the banners of nations.
One turned his own people into kindling for his ambition.
The other built a machine for erasing names, and fed it a whole people, children first.
I could not turn away.
I watched empires gather like storm clouds and break apart.
The British Raj ended. The Soviet experiment collapsed beneath its own weight.
All this passed beneath me.
Generations placed their hands upon my bark and called me ancient, called me guardian, called me immortal.
But age is not immortality.
My limbs grew hollow, chambers for owls and beetles where sap once ran.
My roots, that had gripped through storm and drought and war, began to loosen, the way a hand loosens at the end of a long labor.
The green pulled back from my highest branches like a tide going out and not returning.
I had given enough.
So I released the last of my life force into the dark soil that had held me through every century.
No god stole my life.
Perhaps the gods, who had watched me witness so much death, so much destruction, so much hoarding of what was never anyone’s, offered death instead as a final kindness.
I fell without surrender.
And Sherwood kept the shape of my absence –
a wide, quiet place where the old guardian had stood,
where leaves still tremble in the wind,
as if the forest remembers that even the greatest trees must one day be allowed to stop watching.
– – –
Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, September 2026
What a life Major Oak must’ve had, witnessing some of the best and some of the worst of humanity, simply a passive witness to all the tragedy that unfolded around it, is that a blessed life, a cursed life or simply a life?
Cuz who are the “two mustaches”?