Recollections Of Spring Poem by Gert Strydom

(after H. J. Pieterse)

I remember your disconcert when the starling stripped the apricot-tree
of its pink-white blossoms,
when the jacarandas dropped their purple-blue flowers,
how you still do remember that colour and fragrance.

How the curtains was pulled tight with every blue-white lightning-bolt,
when the spring-rain constantly for days long were pouring down,
where the earth smelled intensely of new life while we slept together.
Also:it's in our intimate memory.I do remember you and you do remember me.

In the garden the black-green starlings
picked all of the yellow-gold fruit of the loquat
where you stood dismayed at the tree
and still do remember that incident.

Starlings, the grey lourie, bush-doves and weavers
flew everywhere up and down and did twitter-sing
until the babbler provoked the Jack Russell
and Carla does remember how she jumped that bird out of the air.

In between all of this our lives went on
into a summer full of peaches,
where doves and weavers ate the chillies to the small pits,
where thunderstorms did come every afternoon.

In this summer, the apricot-tree
is without any fruit
with a speckled barbet that sits in it
where the tree remembers the starling in the spring sorely.

Where we notice the redbreast calling the rain,
we are like morning glories twisted into each other,
while outside lightning-bolts bash down with the storm
and with us the spring's sore and beautiful memories do remain.

[Reference: "Elegie" (Elegy)by H. J. Pieterse.]

© Gert Strydom