Paean to the Olive Tree by Ivars Balkits

 

Image of Olive Tree with 5 Trunks| Ivars Balkits

Paean to the Olive Tree

 

You think you might want to hug them. Or laud them as remnants of what was magnificent and untouched. Yet they have been touched, also butchered and burned and subjected to a thousand cuts. Have they been treated badly? They return the abuse with abundance and a rough beauty, rougher over the decades and then centuries. They model resilience and survival and do it with grace.

 

Of course they are a monocrop on Crete (and much of Greece); though most tracts are small and have been family-owned for generations. They provide both whole fruit and that pressed for cooking oil; they provide wood for crafts and heating, fuel for lamps, pomace for making candles, pits for road construction when mixed with asphalt, etc. In addition to sustenance and income, people cherish the groves as places of peace and refuge. As symbols of friendship, hope, renewal, and peace, olives have been integral to sacred rites going back to early Minoans and up to present-day Orthodox Christians.

 

If you regard nature as no-human-intervention, you might hesitate to call an olive forest an ecosystem. Cultivated, domesticated, amputated, nature mostly they’re not. Though less than wild, they do anchor complex communities of living and non-living. On Crete, the edge environments sustain wild sage, thyme, rockrose, multiple arums, calla lilies, chamomile, gladioli, dittany, capers and both feral and cultivated grapes, sharing space with bitter almond, carob, holm oak, prickly pear, and wild pear, amid white and black lichen-covered boulders and fencerows. In the interior of the groves, both modern and ancient, wander ferrets, badgers, hooded crows, cicadas, and mobs of sheep, goats, shepherds, hikers, and equestrians.

 

I walk out to the ancient groves on the road back behind the village of Avdou. I know these old trees very well: The one with the massive knobs; the one with a rock stuck in the crotch; the split one with the silver and black interior; the trunk with the nacreous surface; the blue spiraling one; the one with the relatively thin base and fat middle; the deeply grooved one overtaking and merged with a metal gate. Their thick multiple twists and cavities evidence a long and noble struggle for the light, hundreds of years in the making.

 

Most of all, I am here to visit the tree of five trunks, possibly split from one trunk long ago, in effect forming its own grove. I go often to attempt to capture its awesome contortive elegance in a photograph. At an estimated 1,000 years old, it is still too young to have been part of any plantation Minoans tended. On the island, though, there are a couple of trees over 3,000 years old, one in Kavousi in the east and one in Ano Vouves in the west of the island.

 

Such a right model for human behavior: all these old ones do is grow – silent witnesses to the rise and fall of multiple societies, multiple near-apocalyptic events, wars and prosperity, times of human vagary, hubris, and triumph. Meanings attach to the trees like leaves, like cicadas, like light. I walk among them, portals to great significance, a witness to their ballet. Dancers in tableaux, indeed, expressive, reaching, twisting, bending, formed in counterpoise to the rotation of the earth, prevailing air currents, and their placement in the grove. Each with a personality distinct from any other. Venerably gnarled, sinewed, knotted, fissured, and cratered – and many still producing.

 

And many still dancing. May they dance for another 1,000 years.

first appeared in Greek Ethos, Issue 36, Spring 2024, a publication of the Greek Olympic Society of Columbus, OH

© Ivars Balkits

Ivars Balkits

A dual-citizen of Latvia and the USA since 2016, Ivars Balkits lives part of the year in Ohio but mostly in a small mountain village in Crete, Greece. His poems and prose have been most recently published online by Poetose, The Palisades Review, ephemeras, and Vernacular Journal.

Follow Feed the Holy