The Ghost Fruit Trees, Toward the End

[Willahelm]

The Ghost Fruit

The ghost fruit keeps its secrets. Ebon pits,
big as your fist, litter the ground, picked
clean by starburst wrens, skittering
around. Some seeds three years old. Lit
from behind, their blue germs still shimmer:
lively, tiny, doomed. Soon, none will exist.
one shrinking copse, by a waterfall, persists.
Once, ten-thousand spawning behemoths trenched

the river soil. Black-skinned eggs and black-
shelled pits alike they tucked into the brack,
then broody laid until the glowing sprouts
lead the hatchlings up and out, which browsed
the stems until they glowed, and soldiered off
the waterfall into the sea, camouflaged as stars.
(I like the phrasing here. Works nicely with the rhythm and alliteration.)
Now, one last sad-eyed giant, trumpeting,
forlorn, finally tired, finally (I was unaware one could invert the second foot of an iamb, assuming you were going for pentameter. Not that it's the end of the world )
too old, to keep the mound warm enough . . .

She tries. She tries so hard before she dies.

I think the rhythm works nicely with the subject matter. I'm not the biggest fan of putting a full stop in the middle of a line but that may be more a matter of opinion (as you can probably guess, I'm not the biggest fan of enjambment in this sort of poetry.) Nonetheless, the story does progress quite nicely. A pleasurable poem for me.