The Lemon Trees

We received more news today about Grandma’s cancer.  She may have as little time as three months.

We’re all very sad.

This poem has comforted me this evening, as I have indeed seen Grandma’s lemon tree through the half-shut gate, among the leafage of a court.

I hope it comforts my family as well.  You, too, may find it heartening at the end of a long winter.

I’ve included a recording of me reading it, made on my laptop in my home office, so it’s a bit echo-ey–but if you prefer audio, there it is, below the text of the poem.

The Lemon Trees

Listen; the poets laureate
walk only among plants
of unfamiliar name: boxwood, acanthus;
I, for my part, prefer the streets that fade
to grassy ditches where a boy
hunting the half-dried puddles
sometimes scoops up a meagre eel;
the little paths that wind along the slopes,
plunge down among the cane-tufts,
and break into the orchards, among trunks of the lemon-trees.
Better if the jubilee of birds
is quenched, swallowed entirely in the blue:
more clear to the listener murmur of friendly boughs
in air that scarcely moves,
that fills the senses with this odor
inseparable from earth,
and rains an unquiet sweetness in the breast.
Here by a miracle is hushed
the war of the diverted passions,
here even to us poor falls our share of riches,
and it is the scent of the lemon-trees.

See, in these silences
in which things yield and seem
about to betray their ultimate secret,
sometimes one half expects
to discover a mistake of Nature,
the dead point of the world, the link which will not hold,
the thread to disentangle which might set us at last
in the midst of a truth.
The eyes cast round,
the mind seeks harmonizes disunites
in the perfume that expands
when day most languishes.
Silences in which one sees
in each departing human shadow
some dislodged Divinity.
But the illusion wanes and time returns us
to our clamorous cities where the blue appears
only in patches, high up, among the gables.
Then rain falls wearying the earth,
the winter tedium weighs on the roofs,
the light grows miserly, bitter the soul.
When one day through the half-shut gate,
among the leafage of a court
the yellows of the lemon blaze
and the heart’s ice melts
and songs
pour into the breast
from golden trumpets of solarity.

— Eugenio Montale, trans. Irma Brandeis

TheLemonTrees.mp3