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.