The Pear Tree Dance 1999(detail)
Artist Lesley Fitzpatrick
Photographer Hans Versluis

Cape Lilacs
for Elizabeth

'Cape Lilac, we call these.' In South Perth
Elizabeth pointed to the massive crown of blooms
That made the modest trees a great posy
So delicate no Kodak film could pin them.
'In Queensland,' I said, 'we call those White Cedar;
It is a rainforest native.'

            I learned, later.
It is ubiquitous. It thrives in the Balkans,
in Asia, in warm Africa. The rainforest examples
of my youth proved birds were the first migrants.

Late spring, Adelaide. I am taken back
with a sudden pain to that park in the West,
and our day together. Cape Lilac,
I hear your voice in that name, Elizabeth,
and again its flowering canopy forces abundance
from a delicate framework, like ghosts in the flower shadows,
and like your voice, re-naming for me
a whole new territory from things
I had assumed I knew unerringly.

2006
Shapcott, Thomas. "Cape Lilacs." The City of Empty Rooms. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2006. 10. Also published in Blue Dog: Australian Poetry 5:10 (2006): 8.

Dedicated to Elizabeth Jolley.