Evergreen by David Malouf

Megan

Mary


At twenty an admirer
of crocus and hyacinth, all
those dawn stars like snowflakes
lighting the grass,
I expected like them
to burn out fast, touch paper
flaring, gone
in a quick blast before thirty.
How else should one live?

And here I am a decade
on from that early death.
Having endured
thirty and the years
beyond, it's the stolid ones, the inchling
head - in - clouds slow - growers
I envy -  turning stars
in their branches, holding
fast to the earth.

It's trees I look for nowadays,
year after year
adding their rings, recording
this month's frost, that season's
burning,  the arrival
and departure of leaves, birds,
mice, barefoot invaders,
and applecore wars
in the kingdom of twigs.

I've discovered an old man's folly,
I'm planting giants :  wych elm,
chestnut, larch, a seed
cast into the next
  long  - shadowed century.
I doze in the
shade of a bunyah pine, its roots
deep in the 1880s,
bubbling with doves.

In its wind - rocked boughs the heavy
green Pacific drowses
and grandfather sets sail
to find us; the tree is
dreaming our lives.
Its dust - thick shadow reaches
the road, and I
swing high on a tide of voices.
Green, green, evergreen.