Preamble: it took the death of a friend to push me into at last trying free verse, and quite frankly it makes me nervous.

Decades proud

You were of this land long before the moving bone-bags appeared

claiming paper-thin possession.

Still, generous to a fault, you shared the profits of your growth.

I wonder how many generations you trained

in the art of pick-your-own?

Lips on golden skin still sun-warm,

Stones teeth-stripped, ejected into the undergrowth.

How many cupboards furnished with your donated flesh,

pounded and embalmed in sweetness?

Some years you gave so much that countless orbs were relinquished

back to the Earth from whence they came,

a carpet of plums lost underfoot even as their sisters were plucked to temporary safety.

 

But now you lie fallen.

Betrayed by a treacherous false Spring,

deceived into early awakening.

Too soon top-heavy -

who would have thought that an army of a-seasonal snowflakes

would be enough to fell one so tall?

We found you in the late schoolday afternoon,

dying slowly in the April cold

Irrevocably uprooted, pulsing your last.

Deaf but not insensible to your silent death-throes

we did our best to pay our respects;

littlest one even shed a tear,

then we went in for tea.

 

Your remaining relics

squirrelled away for a winter such as the one that killed you

will pleasure our tongues for only a few more seasons.

But, even as the memory of your taste runs dry,

we shall put our hopes in your off-spring -

those of the discarded plum stones

that fate has selected for the future.