The Ghost Fruit Trees, Toward the End

[Leanne]

As you can see, I've got virtually nothing to pick on here. Your enjambment and stanza breaks are perfect, with some wonderful assonance on the i sounds in the first stanza especially. This is a careful, delicate poem that builds layers of imagery to a hard-hitting, emotional final line. I really enjoyed this.

The Ghost Fruit

The ghost fruit keeps its secrets. Ebon pits,
big as your fist, litter the ground, picked
clean by starburst wrens, skittering
around. Some seeds three years old. Lit
from behind, their blue germs still shimmer:
lively, tiny, doomed. Soon, none will exist.
one shrinking copse, by a waterfall, persists. -- capital O for One
Once, ten-thousand spawning behemoths trenched

the river soil. Black-skinned eggs and black-
shelled pits alike they tucked into the brack,
then broody laid until the glowing sprouts
lead the hatchlings up and out, which browsed
the stems until they glowed, and soldiered off
the waterfall into the sea, camouflaged as stars.

Now, one last sad-eyed giant, trumpeting,
forlorn, finally tired, finally -- maybe just "tired", not "finally tired" -- or maybe reverse the order to play up the alliteration: tired, forlorn, finally
too old, to keep the mound warm enough . . .

She tries. She tries so hard before she dies.