Macao winter
under casuarina tree
I taste cocoa

Instead, you've fed the melody of the stamens. When soaked in summer, they dry on their pitiful shafts. You have boosted chants of the harvest. You have seated yourself deep in the wheat fields in order to hear the whisper of the ponds. To be hypnotized there by the soaring dragonflies. Tango and butterflies. In my childhood there were many more butterflies than now. Pesticides have been used because of swallowtail butterflies. You got me lying there like a sack of grain, deep in the songs of wheat.

Born in 1945, Georges Friedenkraft is a French scientist and poet, married to a Malaysian journalist. He has contributed to poetry anthologies and magazines worldwide.