Tuesday Poem: Cowarral Sequence ii—The Orange Tree, by Joanna Preston

from Cowarral

ii. The Orange Tree

Older than all of us, dowry for a new life.

A sapling rough-swaddled in hessian,

dragged behind a bullock dray

across rivers named as they went.

It kept want at bay – at leaf-tip, root-tip.

Fruit against the leaves was the glow

of campfires seen from a mountain pass.

It anchored light to the world.

Satinbirds wove altars to it, offering pieces

of the sky. I disturbed a shield bug

and gave my eyes –

there was pain, and three days

of blindness, as though I’d looked

into the face of a god.

~ from The Summer King, Otago University Press, 2009

Reproduced here with permission.

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About the Poem:

Cowarral is one of two main sequences in Joanna Preston’s first collection The Summer King (Otago University Press, 2009), which won both the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award (New Zealand) 2008 and the Mary Gilmore Prize (Australia) in 2010. I have made no secret of my admiration for The Summer King as a collection, and particularly love the Cowarral sequence—possibly because it speaks to my own roots in rural New Zealand, a cultural experience that is still shared between an Australian heartland such as the Cowarral of the poem and our New Zealand sense of place. For me, Cowarral is about turangawaewae—a physical and cultural ‘standing place for the feet.’

Last year, Joanna very kindly allowed me to share Cowarral iii A Summer Storm with you here. Even then I was torn between sharing that or ii The Orange Tree, so am very pleased that Joanna agreed to let me feature it here today.

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About the Poet:

Joanna Preston is a Tasmanaut poet, editor, and freelance creative writing teacher. The Summer King is her first poetry collection and she is currently dividing her time between her husband, her chooks, and work for her second collection.

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