The grove reprieved

Orchards are my family tree:
veinyard, vineyard, nursery
beside the Parramatta river,
where George S. raised citrus,
grapes, root-stock carried
all the way from Spain by sea,
in days of sail.

His grandson and his great-grandson
came to grief in Queensland drought
on a farm where fruit-trees
were the casualties that counted least,
my father's wistful orange-groves
that breathed of brides, his father's vines,
custard-apples, mango-thickets, limes.

In me, tradition seeks reprise:
watering by hand last night,
trying to coax the lemons,
pomegranates, figs, to stay alive.
Lightning snickered in the west,
thunder growled dyspeptically,
sceptically I kept on with my mission
to help trees survive,
listening as liquid sank
in porous loam's drought-shrunken sponge,
imagining I heard the saplings sigh
for aqua's anodyne, as water surged
in atrophying arteries.

The mercury fell suddenly,
snapped yellowed leaves from Chinese elms,
a sound like desiccated rain, a mockery.
But then the clouds' first
tentatively offered drops gained impetus,
as if resolved to plunge to Earth in unison...