“You must be speaking from your own backyard,”
We’re chatting on mobile, she listens hard
To the blithe calling of the figbirds free
To chirp inside my oleander tree
They clamber up a high dendritic branch
And flit about a brightly flowering tranch

But seasons come and go, skies dull and grey,
Along gnarled stems white fungus comes to lay
Stones are covered in gloomy garden mould
The birds are gone and footprints have grown old
There is a tree that sits…alone somehow
I don’t know who it is that phones me now