Lemon Eucalypt

Looking through my poetry folder for something else, I found this, almost forgotten, poem from my short stay on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland last year. We were making paper out of native peach, among other plants.

Lemon Eucalypt

In transit

through a window

this land looks

like home.

The human eye

was bred

to focus

on the familiar

I understand

the impulse

of European settlers to give

Northern names to native plants.

But a native peach

is not a peach,

bearing tiny hard bitter berries

so I close my eyes

and let my ears open

to the kookaburra’s manic cackle

and my nose open

to the scent of lemon eucalypt.