Poems: Sights of spring
This week’s Poet’s Corner features a further selection of poems from Patrick O’Donohue.
Haiku
Shook from Adelaide’s
high places, butterflies surf
the hummed tides of spring.
Two bells, one pod, lay
on the perfect space. Above,
a joy-throttled tree.
Thinking With the Trees
Pepper trees droop in July’s soft drizzle
all along Penfold Road, with the Grange vines
just a spit away from bus stop 19B.
Gripped in expectancy of spring’s riot,
the idea of wine waits on summer
and its revolution of revealed fruit,
the conspicuousness of veraison,
arrested, soaked in oak, freed on palates
curious for lifted meat notes seethed thrice,
and those of wood, leather and liquorice.
So, season’s palette of Magill’s hard light
swills in the mouth’s emancipated taste,
its republic of anticipation
bleeding as red wine, distilled on joyed tongues,
shocked with pepper trees and the eastward sun.
Patrick O’Donohue was born in Brisbane and lives in Adelaide with his wife Clare. He is a member of Adelaide’s long-standing Friendly Street Poets Collective, and has been published in their Readers. Getting published is always a challenge, he thinks, “but I continue to try to make an imprint on Spacetime by growing tomatoes and writing poetry, and taking note of things in what is a difficult but infinitely interesting world”. See Patrick’s previously published poems here on Poet’s Corner.