There isn’t a coin in the pocket
of my jeans, to peel from my palm,
not a dream that can breed for us.
A scant mention in the guidebook,
twelve miles from the nearest fencepost,
The Wishing Tree, trophying currency
jewellery, French, German, Dutch
denominations and monarchs, sovereigns,
farthings, francs, rands, brass razoos,
a language I can’t quite fathom.

Ribbons of coins inlaid like buttons,
dripping off the bark like green fish-scales.
Each coin troving the weight of ambition,
bent and bashed into every crevice
and each nook with a rock, now clasped in a mantle,
each hope and dream and wish time-sealed,
as if  the tree is keeping a secret,
party only to the fist of it’s stash
and those that made the pilgrimage.

Those coins that spot the ground incubate
a smell of ghosts. Are those dreams lost
like drowned stars in the sea?
Here a branch in the outlying grass
nailed with a congregation of coins.
I lift it as a priest to show my wife.
To steal it would be to loot the dead.
I replace it in its exact definition.
Something pitches up of its battery,
a spirit charge of pagan religion.