my mango tree; a poem

When I was a child and I didn’t know the world,

I saw a tree in a man’s front garden.

The tree had a mango hanging from it; big and impossibly orange.

This mango, I knew, would taste like a sunset, like first kisses and the one quick sip of champagne I was allowed on New Year’s Eve.

I could almost taste it from the other side of the fence where I lingered, short and unsure, feeling the juice running down my face and fuck it, I didn’t care that it was his and not mine,

I wanted it all the more, as is so often the hallmark of childhood.

It was only after years of passing this tree,

Years of longing and desire and pointlessness and years and years and years,

That I learned the mango was actually just a sad, deflated and sun-bleached orange balloon;

Perhaps an echo of a long-forgotten party,

Left to wilt on a branch till it succumbed to the terrible passage of time and ozone.

It had never occurred to me that the reason my mango never grew and never rotted was because there was nothing remotely natural about it,

Not the taste of sunset, but the taste of acetone.

Listen . . .

Can you hear children laughing, the shrieks and quick-drying tears of grazed knees?

The adults remedying stubbed toes, mediating delicate alliances between young dictators and drinking too much white wine?

Can you feel the dark warmth of Australian summer nights, the endlessness of youth and the inevitability of changing seasons?

My mango is still there to this day,

Doing what it can to entice as many children as possible,

And remembering the days when it was just a little less deflated and a little more orange.