Out the front of 69 Livingstone Street, Ivanhoe
a Melaleuca linariifolia stood in the nature strip,
one of a string of half a dozen or so: paperbarks.
Untidy, half-peeling white flaps of bark hugged the trunk,
each thinner than a cigarette paper. Like a big broccoli,
dense, creamy white flowers clumped in its canopy.
But the flowers were way up high. From the window
in the front room of my rented house, only the trunk
could be seen as I groped for undergraduate sentences.
Words required pulling from my fettered mind.
Often they stayed as stuck as the dirty white bark
on that tree, as wind whistled down Livingstone St.
None of us had a motor mower but a push-job
was good enough for most of the nature strip
even if it was a hairy proposition on the road side,
involving street stepping around the scruffy girth.
By the end of Honours year, no mower would fit
and the grass had to be clipped or stay shaggy
The Cal Bung house has long bitten the dust now.
Units, at least six, splay out on the old block.
But the paperbark has only firmed its claim.
The circumference of the trunk is now such
that not only can no grass be seen on the road side
or the footpath side but the concrete kerbing
has cracked. I’ve fallen short of the doctorate
hurdle but forty years down the track, the nature
strip paperbark has its eyes on a bitumen prize.
bw
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the POETRYETC list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=POETRYETC&A=1
This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/POETRYETC, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/
|