Remembering Jeanie
We went stone-gathering at dawn,
Ungainly in old boots
Still sticky-eyed and dry-mouthed
To gather the rocks recently
Risen from the new-ploughed earth
My heart awoke first, and I forgot to breathe
For a moment when I saw you –
As if for the first time –
Your black hair curtaining your face
As you stooped to gather jagged chunks
And then sliding back as you rose,
Loose-limbed and lambent,
To cast your crack-belled harvest,
Into the rust red, dented trailer
“He’s dreaming again” you said to Bernice
“Hey you: wake up”
You might have smiled,
A muse then and now, unknowingly
Holding my hospitalised heart
Why wake? Soon enough
The red sun risen
From a distant ridge would turn
A fierce yellow-white
And the last floating moments
Of a cocoon-warm night
In a foreign summer
Would be gone.
~
Fifty Years On
Vanquished by another night’s vanished sleep,
Whole slabs of stainless-steel memory
Rise, unbidden, behind glued eyes,
Whole and unaffected
By all that has come since.
Here then is one.
November, the smell
Of baked red fissured earth
In the late afternoon,
When the sun, weary of being unsung,
Slips behind the line of hangdog eucalyptus.
November, we venture out from cool, bare rooms,
Squat with Turkish coffee on rough grass,
And wonder when the rains will come.
November, we air in hope
Faded patch-padded quilts
And caress the quiet moments,
Before they are scattered
By the first puffs of seaborne wind
Urging on floating citrus blossom.
November, dreams of perfection
Scattered like the pastel shreds
Of gum tree bark that nest
In crevices and corners
Of the heat-cracked, crazed
Country road to Naffakh and Kuneitra.
November in Galilee, bark and blossom:
Late summer crowns
On the forgotten roof
Of the khan, abandoned
Amongst the twisted olive trees.
~
Galilee Spring
Next year’s fruit is being prepared
With silent sap at dawn,
In deafening quiet
Until we arrive
Sweat stings my eyes –
Thorns scrape thin blood lines
The length of my arms,
And I sneeze reflexively
When the smell of waxy citrus blossom
Hits midday in the long lines
Of lemon and orange trees
Our cherry-pickers rise and fall,
Roar their unanswered challenge,
Like cartoon dinosaurs, fall and rise –
Mechanised ladders in primary yellow –
A dream of galleons lurching
From one high perch to the next
Flowering hills oversee our groves,
Green briefly carpets the grey eroded rock,
Poppies and anemones take their curtain call
Greased oily engines belch butane smoke
Burn the air into flickering images
And when we leave
Some symbolic moment
In a forgotten Italian film
The Finzi-Continis’ deserted garden
Is reenacted, a daily ritual
When dust, fine brown dust
Rising from the soil
Salutes the dark green cypress sentinels,
Hangs like a ragged patchwork
A moment of dancing translucent curtains
Then drifts downwards
____________
David Allard is a retired schoolteacher and dairy farmer, now nurturing cyclamens and grandchildren. Poems and short stories have been published in the USA, the UK and Israel.