The online link to the Review and these poems is

http://www.hartnell.edu/homestead_review/Spring_2014/index.html

 

LANE COVE



On 4th Avenue

next to the house

you lived

in second grade

was a big gum tree

cicadas came to

every summer

left their shells on the bark

as they crawled out

wet, soft

grew big and green

had long shiny translucent

rainbow wings


You’d catch one

using an old Vegemite jar

with holes in the lid

then let it go

after a couple of days


On warm evenings

the smell of eucalyptus

like Vic’s Vapo-Rub

filling the night

you’d fall asleep

your window open

cicadas singing

their loud steady song

drowning your parents

noise fighting down the hall



And then one night

your cicadas would stop

stop singing

disappear

leave only

those brittle brown shells

clinging to the bark of the tree

empty

waiting

for the wind

or rain next winter

to knock them down


Your neighbor

the old man next door

with the big rose garden

and tomatoes he gave your mother

said the shells were left

by cicadas on purpose

to know

where to come back

next year



So you lift one carefully from the tree

wrap it gently in cotton wool

place it in the Vegemite jar

take it with you

closed tight

protected

as your family moves again

at the end of summer

this time to a country town

up near the Queensland border

once more you start a different school



Big gum trees

are in the paddock

behind the new house

you scotch tape your cicada shell

gently to the bark of one of them

so next summer

they’ll find their way

cicadas will

they’ll come back

let you catch them

in their jar



And release them


To sing to you

warm nights

their loud song

cancel the noise down the hall


Keep you safe


                            And let you go to sleep

UNTITLED


. . . farming was an industry . . . . They imported slaves although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and Filipinos (John Steinbeck ‘Grapes of Wrath’)


We finished weeding the field

red and green leaf

to be harvested tomorrow


He stood up

leaned on the handle of his hoe

took off his cap

squinted, looked past me

at the Gabilan Mountains

late-afternoon purple far across the river


Started talking

continuing what he’d told me at lunch

his brothers beginning the Delano grape strike

his now being one the last Filipinos

working the valley


He’s got no family

he’s going home, he said


And now I am old

I will go back to Manila

to the Playboy Club

eat oysters

talk with the bunnies

beautiful girls from the provinces

get a room at a world-class Makati hotel

take one of the girls there, make love all night

go home next morning, before the traffic

to a farm I’ll buy near Baguio


He stopped

we heard a truck go by

on River Road


As he turned

toward the Santa Lucias behind him

silhouette ridge crimson western sky


Then back to me

smiled, gave me his hoe

                             and walked down the field to the bus