Suzanne Edgar: Three Poems

The Fragrance of Lemons

for Sarah Colquhoun

 

I loved the Meyer lemon tree

planted by my neighbour friend,

a pretty woman, vivacious and kind.

She’d squeezed it into a space between

her cobbled path and the old brick wall.

 

It only began to bear good crops

after Laura had moved away:

I missed our frequent talks at the gate.

A series of owners came and went

as the tree began to reach for the sun.

 

I learned too late that Laura had died

but our blue connecting gate remained

and sometimes I pilfered fallen fruit:

the lemons were sweet and full of juice,

with skin a clear chrysanthemum yellow.

 

The latest man to buy the house

uprooted her white oleander hedge

and all the secret English bulbs

she’d set to flower in spring.

Only the lemon tree stood its ground

 

in a place with the look of a wrecker’s yard.

I’d rescue fruit from lopped-off branches

left where they’d fallen against the wall

then stealthily nurse the lemons home,

my apron cradling the precious load.

 

The owner seemed to be pruning the tree,
I never dreamed he’d take it down.

One day I opened our old blue gate

and my breath stopped: I knew it before

I saw the heap of mangled limbs.

 

The wreck of a woman’s dream, they lay

across the broken cobbled path.

I stood in falling rain and stared:

the fruit was blotched with a fetid mould

sodden, pale, and cold to touch.

 

 

Dead Flies Have Been Trapped

 

in the small stone house, set in its niche

dug from the barren side of a hill,

and a woebegone window gazes out

beyond the spidered, cobwebbed sill.

 

Waiting, alert, and willingly watching,

once the glass was dressed in lace,

a delicate pattern of roses and leaves

that never wholly covered its face.

 

Their friend would come with a billy of cream

for the treats of occasional afternoon teas

and the curtains seemed to smile at cups

balanced, uneasy, on decorous knees.

 

These wintry days there’s an air of despair

with never the sound of a cheerful knock

from the friend, in boots, who limped to the door,

a door that, now, is always locked.

 

With eyelets clotted by silting dust,

the fine old lace is frayed and split

but allows a glimpse of darkness within:

though drawn, the curtains have left a slit.

 

And still the patient window stares

down the slope of the tussocked hill

past rusting galvo and broken wire:

he neither comes nor ever will.

 

 

His Mother’s Voice

for John Shaw Neilson

 

“A leering at lasses is where it begins,

the path that leads to certain sins.

 

“Whenever you’re tempted to stray that way,

fall on your knees, seek the Lord and pray.

 

“He’ll know at once when your thought is lewd.

Nothing escapes the ear of Our Lord.

 

“He is ever there; all-seeing, above

and only blesses a conjugal love

 

“so never bring shame upon my head

by touching a woman before you are wed.

 

“Lascivious thoughts are easy to shun

with your hand on the wheel of work, my son.

 

“I speak my mind: now woe betide

should one of mine take a girl not his bride.

 

“And turn your eyes from maids at play

if a wench should even glance your way.”

 

Suzanne Edgar