Orchard

They hail the 66 at Islandbridge;

The sodium arc-tube gas-lights the night;

The pulse of yellow stains the skith of snow

The distortion drains the blood from their cheeks.

They feel estranged, alien, not at home.

Home is the hedged earth they return to.

The apple trees dream sun in the orchard.

Their pith souls quiver through flittering leaves.

While the ripening fruit bends the branches,

The ash-racks stand set for pressing the pulp.

They look from the gable window that glows

with books touched by the words of wild places.

Living on land that has absorbed their kith,

they speak the language of ancestral fields,

bid time of day on felloe-furrowed lanes.

Hands wet with dough she touches the tree trunks.

She transcends to the gods of space and place.

She says apples come from Tien Shan forests,

borne to the valleys in the guts of birds.

along the roads from the place silk was made.

The apple took twelve million years by chance

to fall into their brown willow basket.

Like his fiddle’s G note it faces West.

He spreads used coffee grains on orchard ground.

When he dies she’ll mourn with the apple trees.