“let’s just say” - short poetry film by april october studios _ organic olive harvest on Zakynthos

In Autumn, the island's country roads rumble under the weight of men on tractors, laden with burlaps sacks fat with olives, black, purple green. Olive mills are crowded with them, dropping off sacks, picking up great canisters of liquid green-gold olive oil. October, November, December - women in trees, kids below spreading canvases to catch the fruit. If you're lucky, your trees will be ready to harvest before the weather turns cold enough to nip at your fingers and nose, you will picnic under the bounteous trees.

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olive harvest - poetry film - Zakynthos, Greece -
filmed by ANTA stone villa and their organically farmed olive grove (antaconcept.com)

Let's say the year starts in fall.
Let’s just say it, without asking if it’s true.
There is fruit, dark, perfect, juicy and bitter.
The wind blows and fruit falls.
The wind blows and golden leaves fall.
The grass lies shrivelled from summer.
The fruit is heavy on these branches,
But half lasts till the dying of the light,
Midwinter, they are shrivelled wineskins
That shine like gold in raindrops and sunbeams.
They crust the concrete with loamy pebbles,
Fertilize glades, groves, gutters, and concrete.
Thick grass prepares to coat everything.
Trees look always the same, unchanging though
The slender stalks that unfurl the first eye-soft leaf
In the gentle days before spring have turned into ship-like
Hollow cases adrift on the land,
Caught in walls, falling into wells, filled in the flood
with dirt like that they sprang from,
wine-dark, mixed with seeds,
half rot and half roots.
The dirt inside such twisted coffins harbours stories, people never seen before, a carnival of life. That bitter juice, that smooth black skin, those large craggy seeds, those silver blades hold forth, deliver a message for the whole community of life.

The wind carries it,
the summer comes in with slim blossoms,
messages carried still further.
Messages of cream,
of the fat of life and
the almost sensible secret scent of growing things.
Summer makes seeds of tiny buds,
puts flesh on their bones,
sends them bouncing and bright
into the hands of little children
amidst the thrill of a first gentle lifting
up to the community of twigs and air.
They grasp, release, gasp at the height,
The ancient dance is skilfully executed by chunks of solidified light.
The bright new baubles, pale as grass,
entice the child to put a foot on the first step of roots and
each step leads to the next.
The sense of the limbs takes over.
The puzzle is laid bare.
Old, still arms made light with new life lift and lift.
The process is self-evident,
the mystery cracks open.
Weights meet in balance,
wood bounces, a foot bounces
and a seed in such a state can sometimes bounce as far as the sea.
That sea tells secrets,
hears everything whispered,
sends its waves to lend a hand.
It carries the sky inside and out,
light in every straight line stirring the mess together.
It rests and wrinkles the bones of old groves when their roots go deep enough.

Like always, summer grows heavy and sags,
vines and fields are sticky and buzzing with life,
juice runs over the dry grasses. Ripening, always ripening.
When fall comes again,
they stand ready to receive a communion of sorts,
secretive but informal, an exercise of limb and mind,
an activity that must end in mulch.
Everything dies like this, sacrificing its former life to future life.
Dying is fundamental. Seeds and seedlings eat their clothes
And offerings are made to all, regardless of deserving.
Food is given in every form but only some look to us like death.
A rot produces a perfume too; some say it is not very different from an orchid’s.

We take and take, fill pockets and pantries,
Stain our clothes our hair our minds, and feed on oil that burns our throats for sheer freshness
What’s left will be torn apart by the wind.
Hidden away, purified to the utmost, a fruit becomes a commodity
Its link to its old life withers away.
Its future existence stretches forth as always, exploring the vast web of possibilities


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