A poem for Spring. And a monument to metaphor and simile…When it’s just about to be broad bean season!

The Broad Bean Sermon Les Murray

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade

without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,

recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.

Upright with water like men, square in stem section

they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,

kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.

Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest

snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several dimensions:

spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage.

Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence tops, you find

plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later

you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of day light

appear more that you missed: ripe knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,

thin-straight , thin-crescent ,frown-shaped ,bird-shouldered,

boat-keeled ones,

beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,

beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers

in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice

that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover

till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or

do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality

like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions

like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string

and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,

the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers…

Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness

it is your health –you vow to pick them all

even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

say that aloud