Home After Weeks Away

Ross Gillett

Neon green weeds are choking the sequoia.

Big weeds, you’re thinking—no, a small sequoia.

Four years old and four feet high, a stook

of a tree an ageing neighbour once mistook

for a plastic Christmas fir. No lights flash

on this youngster, nothing happens in a flash

when it comes to redwoods. I kneel and pull

weeds from under the lowest branches. Pull

and hurl, pull and hurl. The weeds fly off

into the distance. They almost pulled it off,

hidden in dank shade, the dampest dark

colonised while I was absent, in the dark.

Strange, I hear you saying, to have planted

a sequoia at seventy, but I have planted

in modest hope, thinking I might see

my redwood reach my height. Today I see

its crown alive with soft new needles, height

happening before my eyes. The height

of optimism, maybe, but as we grow

older, at some stage we begin to grow

shorter. If I can keep the virulent green

of weeds clear of this fledgling’s darker green,

with luck one day we’ll stand together, a sequoia

the height of a man, a man the height of a sequoia.

ROSS GILLETT lives on Dja Dja Wurrung country in Daylesford in the central highlands of Victoria. He has won a number of Australian awards, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and his books The Mirror Hurlers and Swimmer in the Dust are available from Puncher and Wattmann.