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CvK |
The
Lemon Tree |
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We planted a lemon
tree where the sun will
draw every drop through the ripening earth. The old tree had straggled too far for light,
eclipsed by a neighbour’s elm gleaming
haughtily before the Fall: in shadow
struggling still (fidelity under dignity) in
a dim birth to give us fruit for tea on a
summer’s afternoon: generous of its
seed held as offerings to the never
foreign sun. And I, the son, have planted both
with ceremony. Far of, distant,
green, I have climbed with you on the
ledges above Amalfi over the Central
Sea (some say that the pith of you is
dead). Now rooting out to spread its
water-rationed mouths to inverse seasons
and does not appear to care that days
and water twist another way. So why should I? Am I less compliant than a giving tree
nurtured with compounds and much more
light than a man can bear? Planted deep
within a friable earth, already familiar
to the starlings while a lonely craw all
come to change, bend the pliant with
its springing blossoms unconcerned from
chambers beneath the spade, twine with biting odours and a juice to clear my
startled mouth of words: a space for thought in an
ellipse upon a twig in air. My father and I
planted a lemon tree on Sunday and we stood by
the window to watch through rain and it
illuminated our faces long apart in its slow fingering
through the loam. Well done is down in the
churning where we cannot see. For this day of
rain we left the sea and bought a lemon
tree more fruitful for us than any load
it could wish to bear. |
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