Then the first yellow flower forming on the seedling
catches the light like a Star of David pinned to a lapel,
and I see, hooked into the soil, the plastic arrow that announces,
as if a label makes it true, Leb Mini Munch Cucumber,
a sly belittling that it cannot counter or resist, this pale vine
whose forbear seeds might have left the Baanoub Valley
in the hands of a quiet man like my neighbour Kasim,
taken for safekeeping from his garden beside an olive grove,
its ancient trees tended through the ages by monks.
Imagine militia threading the rows of split and twisted trunks,
Kasim running with nothing but a fistful of seeds
and the memorised layout of raised beds,
trellis lines and companion plantings,
approaching the coast and a slim chance of America,
seeds pressed to his chest like family secrets,
just as, further west, only six years ago, Nahla and Salem
brought rose seeds from Syria, hip pockets full and chafing
the legs of their twin babies, the seeds snatched from a plot
in a village beyond the mountains where birds no longer sing,
from songless village to desert camp to wheatfield
to the rosefield of their making in Beqaa,
a magenta sea of Damascus rose, thirty-petalled sultani,
honoured by Shakespeare and the Babylonians, buds gathered
at first light before the sun has emptied them of scent,
then stirred to a pink concoction perfected over centuries,
petals bleeding into boiling water for mouneh against the hardship of winter,
for syrupy baklava, kanafeh, mehalabya to offer to the fearful;
and now imagine how, at the end of a summer far from Lebanon,
the settler cucumber, seeking only nourishment and the touch of bees,
sends out one flower of defiant yellow, and soon, new fruit.

**

Louise Oxley’s two collections are Compound Eye, commended in the Anne Elder award, and Buoyancy, shortlisted in the Western Australian Premier’s Literary Awards. Awards for individual poems include the Bruce Dawe, Melbourne Poets Union and Shoalhaven poetry prizes. Louise’s work appears in several anthologies including a number of Best Australian volumes and Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher and Wattman). Her third collection, Range Light, is due out next year with Walleah Press.

P76 issue 9: Poetries of place/ displacement/ diaspora/ odyssey: On-line Edition. Table of Contents