Cider and a Cypress
These days the Calder Highway
Melbourne to Bendigo skirts
(what it once bisected) on its route:
most of its lesser towns and villages.
Woodend, Kyneton, Castlemaine,
without much heavy traffic, breathe again.
Now itıs apple-orchard Harcourtıs turn.
Which side of the green valley
and its village should the bypass run?
The good folk of West Harcourt said the east.
The good folk of East Harcourt said the west.
The sad folk of West Harcourt have lost.
The bypass will be a while coming.
Meantime weıve stayed in East Harcourt
cosy in a former apple shed of granite
next to a granite homestead now restored.
Helen G. of Rose Hillı showed us her garden:
roses, wisteria, lavender, chook-run,
willows round a duck-pond, and treasured
though ugly, a vast ancient cypress,
noted by the committee that turned the road
west not east. Perhaps it helped save us
from going under,ı says Helen. The cypress
is adorned with her daughterıs ponyıs old shoes.
We toast it from a quart of cider supplied
from next door Henry of Harcourtıs Cidery.
Just half a glass makes us woozy.
2
In West Harcourt we call on Helen S.
Weıre sad indeed the roadıs coming our side.
We in the west argued long and hard.
Weıre rather dark on Henry at the Cidery,
heıs evidently a man of power.ı
a view backed by his ciderıs potency.
3
Alone with the cypress, I step up
by old lopped limbs and see within
a round platform of brown foliage
where long since, apple-growersı children
played childhood away keeping house
in the cypressıs enduring embrace.
7.45am, Wednesday 26 January 2005
Max Richards at Cooee, back last night from Rose Hill, Harcourt
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