Saturday, February 4, 2012

“Lupin Trees” © Mike Absalom January 19th 2012

My lupin trees,
planted from imported seed,
once, in the heat of lost long summers.
dripped yellow as melted candles here
stealthily fanning out through the flower beds
like a fifth column.

They waited for a long time, eyes popping,
and sweating patiently in their garish wren-boy masks
alongside the meadow ditch
were finely poised to infiltrate the neighbours’ fields
when the weather slowed down a bit.

They would rattle the buachalán with their exploding pods,
and, aided by crows and the creeping treachery of field mice,
were set to spring into the fen and leg it over the frog-bound bog
like long-distance Ethiopians at the Olympics.

But there is a reason here why old men talk about the weather!

They all died, the lupin trees, of a White Christmas
and left nothing but black bones encrusted with diamonds
poking from the wreckage of their colonial intentions.

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