The old orchard, full of smoking air, <br />Full of sour marsh and broken boughs, is there, <br />But kept no more by vanished Mulligans, <br />Or Hartigans, long drowned in earth themselves, <br />Who gave this bitter fruit their care. <br /> <br />Here's where the cherries grew that birds forgot, <br />And apples bright as dogstars; now there is not <br />An apple or a cherry; only grapes, <br />But wild ones, Isabella grapes they're called, <br />Small, pointed, black, like boughs of musket-shot. <br /> <br />Eating their flesh, half-savage with black fur. <br />Acid and gipsy-sweet, I thought of her, <br />Isabella, the dead girl, who has lingered on <br />Defiantly when all have gone away, <br />In an old orchard where swallows never stir. <br /> <br />Isabella grapes, outlaws of a strange bough, <br />That in their harsh sweetness remind me somehow <br />Of dark hair swinging and silver pins, <br />A girl half-fierce, half-melting, as these grapes, <br />Kissed here –- or killed here –- but who remembers now?<br /><br />Kenneth Slessor<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/wild-grapes-2/
