If Jesus had been strolling around
southern Australia today,
rather
than Palestine in the first-century,
he'd have dropped his fig-tree metaphor
and gone with the Jacaranda.
“Look
at the Jacaranda,” he'd say.
“When
it puts forth its purple-Advent flowers,
to
compete luminescently
with
the sky and to carpet the earth below
in a circle of blue;
can summer be far behind?
No; nor God's kingdom.”
Hail to you, wondrous tree of purple;
botanical
immigrant,
transplanted
two hundred years ago
from
another new world.
Your
dazzling hue has ensured your welcome.
Like
the land's many human inhabitants
you
regard yourself as a true-born native,
among the greens, reds and yellows
of
indigenous eucalypts and wattles.
Hail, Jacaranda!
The
arboretum's John the Prophet,
landscape
herald of one who is coming
and of the remarkable kingdom
of hope and justice.
(For
which, we still yearn.)
For a month you shine, harbinger
of the extraordinary,
until
your flowers fall and fade,
your
leaves of green resume their rightful place,
and we are returned to our ordinary lives.
There
our achings are embraced,
tasks
and challenges are taken up,
and
we get on with it.
©
Ken Rookes 2015
