There is a fig tree in my backyard
now tall and wild and needing a prune,
gnarled and filled with fruit not ready to eat,
and I waiting for the red succulent flesh to
begin to bulge and invite the sweetness
to hit my tongue with memories that
go back to this flesh when I was young.

And as I stood beneath its strange
distorted branches shooting up and
out and down in early evening dark
with the sun gone down to rest,
I did spy a black shadow immense
on a branch high up, dark and sheltered,
and the shadow looked back at me
munching on the fruit, with dark wings
and intense eyes, teeth gleaming,
wondering, perhaps, if I would intervene
and scare it away: but instead I
looked, stunned by it audacity and its
beauty in the tree filled with fruit not
ready to eat but eat the fruit it did.

I stood for a time not afraid as the fig
tree swayed with the shadow moving from
branch to branch, but it never stopped its
gaze, and nor did I, in this moment of
exchange as I watched it consume the fruit
that I desired, but I sensed its right to be
here at dusk with me resolved, till it had
its fill and opened its wings and took its
flight into the growing moon of night sky.

 

21/2/2026