Poem for the Day: A Fig Tree Joins the Singing

A Fig Tree Joins the Singing

Five years ago an Italian family

walked the park near the road where I live,

their big hands filling buckets with figs.

Then the park was suddenly bereft of the tree

and the family, as if the ritual was now only

a ghost of my morning walks.

I told myself they had flown back to their

home country. Later, I noticed the fig tree

hacked to a stump. Tractors were mowing the soccer

field in all directions. Every now and again, magpies

anchored their beaks into mown grass,  a kookaburra

laughed,  and galahs waddled their pink and grey silks,

crunching and moaning at the same time.

Two years ago, a limp wet rag. One year and the fig 

tree is sprouting a sweet politeness, overshadowed 

by a large gum. I thought they might be tree buddies,

as if the older eucalypt was playing God, protecting

young Adam's first cloth. The tree rising up

from earth, the hole at the base of the fruit

as an exit for sweetness to its puzzle inside.

The ostoile, as they call it, drips nectar for ants

and birds. When green skins purple, they signal

a store of jam for the old families who've seen fig trees

explode from the treads of tanks, or simply die

in the ground poisoned by war.  

When figs ripen in the southern hemisphere

the last fruits are withering in the north.

Vandals posing as gardeners had put the tree down,

today it labours skyward, a phenomenal thing reaching

to meet green parrots dropping seed husks,

the fruit's tiger-stripes curving at the apex,

and the mud universe of wasps waiting

bat-like above the fingers of ovoid petals.

It only takes minutes for the queen to lay eggs

for a symbiotic hatching of pink florets.

Why did it receive so much attention?

So what if figs fell and decomposed?

So what if caved-in flesh became projectiles

under shoes? So what if neighbouring Italians

acquired God's free gift? The old women up

in the branches disappearing into their scarves. 

Who was the ripeness for, anyway?

If this tree could speak do you think

it might say more than – massacre or theft?

There is a stillness at present in the park. Every once

in a while magpie larks let out a 'too-wit', and parrots

rebound in overtones. You know that the tree

is reaching out from beneath its host, waiting

for the old women to return with Italian songs,

and the men with their heads and shoulders

in the clouds, sluicing juice into gaping mouths.

Even the tree gives out its milky sap

strengthening its ancient ceremony

of renewal, lifting its course to the green fields,

the pink-and-grey maps of the parrots' wings.

And underneath that overshadowing eucalypt

with all that rattling going on above, is the fig tree –

of leaf, of man, of woman, rising up from the earth

to join all that singing.