Currawongs in the persimmon

I am very fortunate to have persimmon tree outside my window.  It is in a courtyard surrounded by camellias and azaleas.  It was planted in 1972 and has never grown too big so it keeps it ornamental quality. The persimmon tracks the seasons and now it is bearing small orangey yellow fruit. The long dry spell over summer has not been kind to the tree or its fruit despite our  additional irrigation from rainwater tank. In early autumn appear the currawong  which swoop into the dark green foliage and eat the sticky pulp.  The fruit at this time is hard and the birds consume  it all before it has a chance to become ripe and edible. The fruit which falls from beak to the ground is put on the wall; if the currawong does not salvage it the possums do. Having tasted a persimmon and not liking it I do not miss the opportunity to eat the fruit. It is an acquired taste. The pictures below are glossy from the gentle rain. 

PERSIMMON TREE

Up and down on the bare stems

the currawongs sway

tugging at their find,

light flashing off

oil and black feather,

their yellow and black eyes

super-cautious, malevolent.

Every year they come,

harvesting the unwanted crop

never looking older as we do,

generations to the same tree,

while we, half-hidden, watch,

wondering what the taste is like to them;

is it the sticky, floury sweetness,

the acquired flavour

not to our taste?

The season turns into short days,

the foliage is all but gone,

far out on a thin branch,

like a Chinese lantern on a pole,

hangs one remaining persimmon.

A currawong steps out cautiously,

the head jerking in an arc,

sticks clasping a stick, watching,

ever the black seeing eye.

Bird pecks from as far as dares

and the branch bounces wildly,

the talons tighten, the wings arch,

the air flapped for balance.

The persimmon and the bird

spring in unison, a pas de deux

in black and orange; an

unintended comedy.

A reach down to the fruit

leaving V shapes in the soft skin,

then a gobbling of the pinkish pap inside.

But it is hard work and precarious.

A few more pecks and an air borne woosh.

Later we take off this hacked piece

and place it on the courtyard wall.

The currawong returns and finishes it off.

It is a shame to waste good fuel

for a frosty night. 

George Herbert

Simone Weil was deeply affected by the poem Love III by George Herbert.  I could never see what Weil saw in this poem which seems saccharine,  pious and self-pitying. 'Love' in this case is a trope for God alias Jesus.  Herbert feeling 'Guilty of dust and sin' is beckoned by Love to 'taste my meat'.  Given that Weil, a non-observant Jew, did not really believe in the personal God but, as far as I can gather, a divine mystical force to be reached by 'waiting' and 'decreation' it is strange she is moved by what is plainly a coy poetical love feast between Herbert and his personal God.  I could understand Weil's ineffable approach to the divine but am confronted by the literalness of Herbert. I have just finished reading, Music At Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert by John Drury.  I am perhaps at some accord with Weil that in being acquainted with Herbert and reading his verse one can see something of the pure soul and this in itself is refreshing set alongside our confused time of shallowness, distraction and self-absorption.   Herbert so wove his humble life around the Christian project that his hallowed spirit is infused into his poems and his life. To read Herbert is to walk with him and feel welcome and trusted. Herbert is also a foil to the worldliness of contemporary Christianity with its powerful establishments, money-mindedness and pecuniary incursions into secular spheres. As for Weil - I see more Buddhism in her cosmic view than religion.  Those who 'sit' in quiet meditation are about the practice of 'decreation'. John Drury (a chaplain and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford) is  sympathetic but objective, scholarly but not abstruse.