Month: August 2023

Olive

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

Ten arms’ round the olive tree was;
Fifteen feet tall;
Hands down, the oldest wood
This wood would allow.

Knotted and knurled the bark was;
Creased and crimped,
Folded and furled,
Hidden eyes looking on, unblinking.

Silent and sentinel its watch was;
Tirelessly gazing, sensing
The ebb and flow of days
Passing, impassively.

Rich yet stolen the harvest was;
Blackest of birds,
Bitterest of fruit,
Taken whole, its future set.

Scorched and charred its crown was,
Wind-fired, flame-licked,
Blackened and smoked,
Yet, from ashes, new beginnings.




The Orange Train

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

They built it for the oranges,
Bulging with sun,
Dripping from the trees;
Small plots, tessellating up
The stony slopes
Tangy with lavender and thyme
Bright globes of colour,
Between the scrub olive
And holm oak drabs.

Ambling from the City,
Cars and carts clatter
Away, avoiding
The unblinking eyes
And plague bell, tolling;
Over the dust-bowl plain
Desiccated sleepers
Grip Spanish steel tight –
The wooden train
Grumbles its way slowly up
Under sparking gantry.

Breathless,
The escarpment squeezes in
And, as it does, remembered voices
Of tunnellers, wielding
Sweaty picks, barrows, chisels
Echoes through the cuttings; then
Darkness,
Before the bursting
Glare flares forth –
Down, over rock gardens,
Half-caught peeks at encircling peaks,
The shimmer of the azure port
And the orange-gold richly won.

Cape

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

The road grips the hillside
With tortured fingers,
Chalky-dry, like a climber’s hands
Precipitously feeling for the hold;
Side-winder snaking,
Along the dragon’s
Spine, fossilised vertebrae not
The only thing petrified today

The road follows the ridge,
The eye follows the road;
Topping a miserly col
Then yawing off-angle
Around another vexed switchback –
An ants’ column seeking sugar
Slavishly following to its end
The dramatic rock-guarded fort;

The Cape.

Where the billowing swell
Beats the bass-drum rocks below;
Where the changing winds
Scream a mocking siren to doomed mariners;
Where the cliffs rage,
And fall mortally away
To the bullion-stacked holds
Of a hundred triremes.

Pines

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

Bowing to their guests
These bristled old pines;
Their scruffy long beards
And gnarled old muscles,
Racked by a twitchless cramp
Ossified by dendro-arthritis,
They drop their heads
To the wind
As if in servitude,
Or, with great honour,
They greet the sou’wester.

From a wind-blown seed,
Whipped from the clutches of
Some long-lost ancestor,
Nuzzled down in the sand
And, through inhospitable grains,
Sank that first insistent tap-root.
Through storm and flooding tide,
Through blistering Sun across
Countless summers
It fought for life; between
Warring sides –
One the precious fresh,
The other desparate salinity.

Dappled, in their needle
Shade we walk,
Children squeal and play,
Cicada click their
Machine-gun anthem;
The pines, stand guard,
Gnurling and twisting
To the contours
Of the years
Washing over them,
As we walk through
Unnoticed.