I see your ripening fruit

half-hidden in the foliage

several windfalls too

soft-landed on the lawn.
 

It must be thirty summers

since our children climbed

and hid in your leaves, or played

beneath your outstretched branches.

Our children are also yours.

Each Christmas they come home,

sit under your generous boughs

relive for a week their childhood.

Too soon they’re gone, for a year.

Each autumn you offer your fruit

and wait for the summer crop

your other windfall children.

Just now a fragile, yellowed cutting

fluttered from my open desk –

our daughter’s pear-tree poem.

A former English teacher, Liz McQuilkin began writing poetry after retiring. Her collaboration – with Karen Knight, Christiane Conésa-Bostock, Megan Schaffner and Liz Winfield – in the collection "Of Things Being Various" (Forty Degrees South) won the FAW National Community Award in 2010. "The Nonchalant Garden" (Walleah Press, 2014), was her first solo collection. She collaborated again with Karen Knight in "Renovating Madness" (Walleah Press, 2018). Her second solo collection, "Unwrapping Clouds", was published by Forty South in 2022.