Another poem on the poetics of cultivation. In memory of my paternal grandmother (嫲嫲).
The peach tree planted by the fence
is swaying with the morning wind,
its stony marble fruit too fond
to plunge into the spongy ground.
An heirloom of my grandmother,
it changed hands from one to another
when we sold her house after she’d passed.
I remember how with joy she grasped
so many from her windowsill
in midsummer, when the still
tree’s branches stretched far and wide
enough to let her strong arms guide
their way through thick viridian
sheets to seize pink fruit: children
born from years of tender labor.
I wonder whether she'd preferred
them over her other living kin,
huddled in the crowded kitchen
while she watered, raised, and fed
the tree with her calloused, earth-bruised
hands and firm, unyielding fingers.
Later, I learned that the buyers
who purchased her house in Queens
covered the wilding peach tree grounds
with concrete shaped into a driveway:
dense compacted slabs of gray,
the yard now someone else’s plot
where once our lives had taken root.
So as I wait for these peaches
to ripen, wait for the branches
to relinquish their fleshy stones
into my greener unskilled hands,
I know, too, that each fruit borne
will yield the love she sought to earn:
taste of constant diligence,
scent of sweet magnificence,
texture of her caring hand
that one day we might understand
her quiet generosity:
harvest ripe with ancestry.
Note
I shared an edited version of this poem (which was first posted on Saturday, July 13) with dVerse for their Open Link Night on Thursday, August 1, 2024.
Sadly, the peaches in this poem never had a chance to ripen this season---they were devoured by a marauding squirrel just days after I drafted it.
Between Two Rivers 
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