The Almond Trees

There’s nothing here

this early;

cold sand

cold churning ocean, the Atlantic,

no visible history,

except this stand

of twisted, coppery, sea-almond trees

their shining postures surely

bent as metal, and one

foam-haired, salt-grizzled fisherman,

his mongrel growling, whirling on the stick

he pitches him; its spinning rays

‘no visible history’

until their lengthened shapes amaze the sun.

By noon,

this further shore of Africa is strewn

with the forked limbs of girls toasting their flesh

in scarves, sunglasses, Pompeian bikinis,

brown daphnes, laurels, they’ll all have

like their originals, their sacred grove:

this frieze

of twisted, coppery, sea-almond trees.

The fierce acetylene air

has singed

their writhing trunks with rust, the same

hues as a foundered, peeling barge.

It’ll sear a pale skin copper with its flame.

The sand’s white-hot ash underheel,

but their aged limbs have got their brazen sheen

from fire. Their bodies fiercely shine!

They’re cured,

they endured their furnace.

Aged trees and oiled limbs share a common colour!

Welded in one flame,

huddling naked, stripped of their name,

for Greek or Roman tags, they were lashed

raw by wind, washed

out with salt and fire-dried,

bitterly nourished where their branches died,

their leaves’ broad dialect a coarse,

enduring sound

they shared together.

Not as some running hamadryad’s cries

rooted, broke slowly into leaf

her nipples peaking to smooth, wooden boles

their grief

howls seaward through charred, ravaged holes.

One sunburnt body now acknowledges

that past and its own metamorphosis

as, moving from the sun, she kneels to spread

her wrap within the bent arms of this grove

that grieves in silence, like parental love.