Olive Trees

Olive trees in our garden in fruit on ANZAC Day

our children pick them; the aubergine lustre and sweetness rubbed concealing the bitterness under

grown for millennia

fruiting, bafflingly-bitter surely for an age until patient hands leached it, bathed it out, leaving supple flesh to savour fruitful wisdom

pausing in the wisdom the shared sigh the intake of breath, held in the breast, eyes forward, mind searching

back to the cry before the sigh

where the bodies of boys break apart, mind just after, perhaps before, so cruel

was fate to sever them

fate, held in hands gloved in vanity in desperate need

like a child's, for its toy

embittered for all time

with olive trees surrounding, fruiting

but barred from the starving

thin flesh, shattered bone crushed and softened in dirt, summoning red fields bittersweetly.

My children, picking distant olives under blue skies

bitterness leached in laundry buckets.

somewhere after there is a standing bow, a kneel of the heart

always after

as the bugle call a siren song echoes the carry of the fallen to their last post on a wash of dawn vibrato.