Barbara Fisher: Two Poems

A Sort of Tree House

I wake each morning

to windows full of trees,

to their weather news

and seasonal information—

freckled light on leafage,

the gloss of rain, or the stripped

boughs of winter and a bigger sky.

I still marvel that a second-floor flat

can be a sort of tree house,

with all its views and variations

mirrored inside, so that even the rooms

seem forested.

Yet it’s a modest plantation outside.

Against a solid background of brush box,

beloved street tree of many a Sydney suburb,

a few gleditsias offer

their deciduous delights.

Gled what? I hear you say.

It’s a North American tree,

best known perhaps as honey locust,

with pinnate leaves like jacarandas,

but only tiny white flowers.

In spring their graceful limbs

sprout shoots of palest green,

while cicada-singing summer days

bring ferny curtains of a darker shade.

Come autumn and the trees

are canopies of yellow

and when the wind is up they sway

in a frantic arboreal dance.

Birds, of course, are busy in the trees,

weaving in and out, preparing for,

or tending their young.

Once, on a grey winter’s day,

I was presented with a Fauvish little pleasure—

two richly coloured lorikeets

beak to beak on a bare branch.  

Barbara Fisher

Jacarandas 

Every November they challenge us

with that disturbing blue,

a blue cloud for a tree

standing in a blue pool

of fallen flowers.

Avenues become blue tunnels

packed with rapt spectators,

tourists and Japanese wedding groups

posing for photographs

as traffic comes to a halt.

What is it about that blue,

its mauvish loveliness

somehow unsettling?

Seeming to foreshadow

the sun’s sudden withdrawal,

banking clouds in a bruised sky

and a catastrophic storm?

Barbara Fisher