Charles Bennett

Ivy

Is it perhaps time—
although I have always preferred
the smell of hawthorn,

 

loving the way it speaks of how
simply by keeping things light
and letting go of all

 

that’s gone before
I can finally start afresh—
to consider

 

the voice of ivy:
which only at the end
of everything

 

opens its pungent
barely-discernible flowers
to glut a thrumming hubbub

 

of autumn insects,
and demonstrate
the gravitational pull

 

that comes
with late blossom
like a blessing.

 

Holly

How easily I might—
if not for the quizzical
scholarship of bees,

 

who render
from the otherwise
unremarkable

 

eloquent but
softly-spoken meanings—
have passed them by

 

completely—
and missed through
my incompetence

 

the blackbird’s
rapturous welcome
as he anticipated

 

in these quiet flowers
conspicuous nodes
of abundance

 

which in the coming
days of long silence
he will eat.

 

Before the swallows

No. Not sadness exactly.
Wistfulness perhaps but not regret—

as I put on my coat this morning

knowing the fieldfares have left.

 

There’s a quiet in the sky.
A clearance, in which it’s possible to hear

(for a minute or so before the swallows arrive)

 the soft breathing of the year.

 

And somehow my scatter of fruit trees
knows what happens after this.
The sound of blossom opening

is the sound of peacefulness.

 

Here in the garden, now,
in the middle of the possible, I rest.
The blackbird sings a phrase so ravishing

then together we wonder—what’s next?

 

Saltmarsh Appletree

Close to the tideline
where no right-thinking tree
would choose to grow

 

your roots now and then
engulfed by a cold
seep of dark water,

 

you learned to acquire
a taste for stinging brine
and turned your unpropitious
patch of ground into a benefice.

 

Paragon. Parable.
Year by year you make
from salty earth
sweet fruit.

 

Blackthorn

Think of its white flowers
that come before the leaves,

as if to echo the frost
they were born out of.

 

Clustered in such abundance
they look like gathered night,

its berries are dark planets
with their own sour gravity.

 

This is the taste of winter—
smoky globes of dissonance

you only try the once
and then spit out.

 

Sloe tree, what can it mean
that all my life I’ve loved

a tangle of difficult thorns
bitter inedible fruit?