life companions

Out the back, south of the filling garden,
house, sheds together
there was in my childhood a patch of boysens
planted together
sidelong, in half a dozen rows across the hill,
with strawberries
and I still found a few strawberries between
each boysen-bush.

Dad said the strawberries had been planted
before I was born,
long before the boysens were interplanted,
compatibly matched
against strawberries as a planted companion, for he
got two years off
the strawberries before the slow-developing boysens
scratched the backs
of the strawberry pickers, and were ready to put up
on posts and wires.

But that was out of memory for me -like a person
come and gone
before I knew I was able to be known -
for the child I was
knew thrills finding low-ground fruit on
long-unpicked
strawberries, like a friendship accepted
each way.

I went into a "before-me" among such companions...
and long after
the boysens were harvested, set there like dried mud,
I found the past
in that present as in the graces of little strawberries
freely-eaten off old-aged
bushes shared with my sense-stimulated red-stained,
shade and child-friend,
basking in a companionship as if one prayed-to
was there, garlanded under
the sprawl of young thorns held together with
wired old twiggy canes.


8 December 1996 © Wayne David Knoll
St Joseph’s House of Prayer, Goulburn, NSW