Today I stretched across the bramble years
to pick the luscious fruits of memory.
In doing so I caught my sleeve in briars;
the blood-stained sleeve on which my heart is worn.

Although the sun still shone and tiny birds,
cocksure with dainty step and beady eye,
played hide-and-seek with me about the bush,
my mind was lost in autumn reverie,
remembering the purple stain of times
when Henry led me down from Beaconcliff
with gloves and gaiters and with sickle blades
to slash a way through tangled undergrowth,
Death Valley bound, the source of Brownhill Creek.

We fiercely hacked a path, and backs were drenched
with sweat and insect swarms intent to sup,
until at last we reached a stand of trees,
whose Doric columns soared and took our eyes
beyond the canopy that held our dreams,
where filtered beams of light cut through the gloom
with hollow shafts suspending specks of gold,
and we were small in stillness, trapped in haze
of heavy scented eucalyptus leaves,
anointing all our sense with sacred oil.

Occasional elusive coloured birds
flashed through our line of sight, ephemeral,
still etched in mind long after they had gone,
as music lingers past the final note,
and then we heard the outrage of their screech,
their cry, "Beware! Be gone, for strangers come!"

Our minds soon tuned into the insect whirr
and hum of bees that hovered on the flowers
in this our chapel, perilous and rare,
surrounded by a thicket hedge of thorns,
and mordant fruit beyond our wildest hopes.

We picked until the sun began to sink
then struggled back, bowed down with berry loads,
whose heavy press of juice dripped through the seams,
and when at last we reached our own domain
we poured the fruit in pots to make fresh jam
to give to friends, yet gifts we spread abroad
could not include the joy that we both felt,
for in these pickings we were sealing bonds
more firmly than the lids on jars of fruit,
a friendship now that's crystallised in words.