The Finder

I have to tell you he's dying, but smile
for the honeyman, who sweetened every life
with Saturday appearances at the market
throwing pancakes behind a pallisade
of golden jars, bauhinia, mangrove,
ti tree, bloodwood, his best a desert blend.

"I mean to say, if you know what I mean...
those bastards, the developers, those cattle
the council." He signposted a vine thicket
having done his part to save it from clearance
for a golf course, this undervalued fragment
of the rainforest past, the dunes' secret.

Can you imagine how he felt discovering
those metre-wide dinosaur footprints?
All along the coast he mapped the route
of ancient migration, massive and strange
when stone was mud, south swung north
and rivers were that are not. There he walked,

In love with time, a chart in his hands,
almost tears in the telling, to parties
who would take his tours at low tide.
This was the reverence we have lost,
this the passion in stumbling words,
the complete conviction in a leaf.

He often complained of an ignorance in letters,
while making the lemongrass tea and damper.
Others were spouting, he'd always be there
on the social outer, a surer presence
in broad hat, tilted sideways, wide face, a grin
with pots, tin cups, the scones, the honey.

What can I say of this man in the dwindling of nations,
era of rampant commerce, absurd reward for fools
and minor merit? A finder of plants whom the experts
followed, his folio of drawings: faithful, pensive, alive
pages of the future past, his bid to make their budding last,
and keep the troglodytes off your thicket, the honeyman.

"If they only knew what's there! What they call scrub
is teeming wonder, even though that's been thinned out:
eight different mistletoes, insect families attached.
Forgive the elbow marks, sweat splashes on the paper,
I showed their brains where to look, some don't like it
When you're right. That bird's a nectarphile." The honeyman.

By Peter L Bibby