An Ode to the Osage Orange

The Hedge That Dreamed of Virginia

It was never meant for this soil,
this red clay cradle of ghosts and tobacco,
but here it stands: green brain of a fruit,
sticky-sweet and alien,
a thought dropped by the wind
and left to grow.

Its wood is stubborn,
yellow heart dense as old secrets,
once woven into fences
to keep the wild out,
or maybe to hold it in.

Not native, no never,
but neither are the stories
we carry in our bones,
the ones that sprout
where no one expected them.

It smells like summer’s syrup,
like something half-fermented
and half divine.

Children dare each other to touch it,
to hold the wrinkled orb
that looks like thinking.

And isn’t it thinking?
This tree hedged its bets
and grew anyway,
uninvited and unashamed,
a sentinel on the farm
where memory is a crop
and inheritance is thorned.

I walk past it,
and it watches,
quietly brilliant,
a brain in the brush
dreaming of fences
and the places it was never supposed to be.