When the Olives Fall
In the struggle for bread
and love, the voice of the olive tree curls
around its branches, with the clacking
of silver leaves. The olives
are knocked to the ground, and the women
kneel and reach among the nets to pick up
each ripened drupe, staining their fingers, straining
their bodies. Hours will pass, and they will
gather their bodies to walk down the mountain.
The men will place their long sticks into pickups
packed with olives. When the women enter
their homes, the men will wash for dinner
and will come to the table to be served.
Afterwards, they will clink their glasses
at the kafeníon, leaving the women to clean up,
to keep their home like a sanctuary,
where they’ll slice the bread to dip into just-pressed
oil, fill their mouths with olive roundness,
their bodies with a labored fullness. There will be
a balance of duty and desire, hunger and fulfillment.
It will echo through the fruit-bare trees standing on hillsides,
along the coastal road that carries the women home
on the narrow paths winding through the village
where they have to wait for donkeys to pass,
where their own bones rattle on stone. Fear will dissolve
from fatigue, and the night will wrap
itself onto their bodies. The scent
of the olive trees will permeate the rooms,
having yielded enough fruit to fill
the jugs with oil for the coldest season
that spills into the rest of the year,
before the women kneel again
under the hovering trees’ blossoming.
Donna J. Gelagotis Lee is the author of two award-winning collections of poetry, Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry 2018, and On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006). Read more.