This is my belated submission to the challenge (by Ingrid at Experiments in Fiction) to write a spring sonnet. I must admit, I tried initially to write about my beef that it’s autumn where I live and yet we still partake of symbols of fertility like easter eggs and we decorate our supermarkets with bunny footprints, etc. Anyway I wrote a sonnet but decided it was boring and whingey. So here’s my second attempt. I didn’t really attempt iambic pentameter (which I found funny when I googled it as it said it was five metric feet. Sounds imperially metric to me.) But feel free to see if you can find any accidental da DUMs.
It is Easter in Australia, - that’s autumn, not spring but in the olive grove, the trees march in quiet rows of spinning light and shade, and exuberant fruiting - Koroneikis, Missions, Corregiolas, and Frantoios bowed under sprays of self-shadowing green nuts. Come May and we’ll meet, wielding orange plastic rakes with a catching trampoline bed that opens and shuts around the trunk of each tree, funnelling our takes into buckets. For oil, the rakes make for quicker picks but if you want to pickle table olives, it’s one by one. Pendulino, Manzanillo, Kalamata, UC13A6 Place them gently into padded bags, strapped to your front. The dogs will frolick over grass swathes – a canine ideal - while willy wagtails chatter and overhead the wedgies wheel
Out of the Cave 
A lovely descriptive sonnet. I like the way the second stanza flows into the third, and I thought the whole thing well worth the wait.
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Thank you. That is a generous comment. 🙂 I must admit sonnets have me a bit beat. I have never felt their rhythm/rhyme in my soul.
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I’m with you on that. Sonnets have a real old fashioned rhyming pattern which doesn’t sit well with me.
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a magnificent sonnet of exuberance: and what a great couplet !
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Thank you so much. Sonnets are not my natural playground.
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Lovely images of olives both in Autumn and spring. And I like that you broke free from the constraints of the imperial metre! We got roped into some olive pruning yesterday, but I wasn’t much help as I’d already climbed a mountain!
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Thanks. I have never been much use at pruning. The decisions are bigger than my pay grade. 😉
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The olive descriptions are ripe and help the poem flow. Enjoyed the last couplet especially the willy wagtails chattering. Bravo!
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Thanks. 🙂. It all started with the wonderful Italian and Greek names. But they were harder to make poetry with than I thought.
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Excellent! And I never realised table olives were all hand picked.
When I was a kid even picking was above my paygrade at my grandparents citrus orchard. I used to get stuck in the big shed doing the washing and waxing.
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I did some packing and cleaning at a peach orchard while I was at uni. It wasn’t easier. Just shadier. 😂
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