Orange Song in Arcadia

By: Jess Martini

An orange isn’t a lemon by some other name;

it’s a seed bearing flesh passed from hand to hand across conquests.

Still sweet, its juice is acidic and cleansing;

its oil dilates the nostrils, uplifts the face, and brightens the heart.

The orange tree is the gem of the garden,

the beauty of its fruit depicted as early as the Song Dynasty.

The bright orb’s birth in literature is older still,

named by Qu Yuan in an ode: “the orange (桔) came and settled here.”

Came from where? Traced to its ancestors

in the Himalayan foothills, the orange knows no other birthplace.

Eight thousand miles from home,

the seed of the sweet orange knew many soils before this desert.

Fed by acequias, the seed remembers

the laborers who toiled and found shelter south of these groves.

Now, we fall under the orange tree’s hypnosis;

in my grandmother’s backyard, oranges wrap us in art and literature.

Not native, still we claim it: citrus

as a symbol of here, making good and permanent the identity of here.

But here will change;

citrus trees, and even the saguaros, will fall in the hot summers.

Here was produced, too, of red lines and erasure;

no neighborhood is as idyllic as it seems, with its fruit orchards.

In a family tree, a history,

some memories pucker, as the sweet orange descended from bitter.

Here is an orange tree; god did not plant it.

The flesh of the human, bearing a seed, seeking a wage, planted it.

An orange seed migrates back home,

from land to land to the hand of the child of the hand, as if to say:

here, now, let us begin again.

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Jess Martini is a writer from Sedona, Arizona, who earned an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Northern Arizona University, where she teaches in the English department. Her work has appeared in CutBank, The Hunger, Barzakh, and The Wayfarer, and other journals.