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How quickly this year, the garden was painted with snow
the brown earth hidden, inch by inch,
its months of honest labor buried, its future put on hold.
Over by the fence, the limbs of the handsome pine tree
tremble already under the weight of the soggy flakes.
A couple of stars peer down with clinical gaze.
Paths as yet unswept. Few neighbors will venture out
until morning, I bet.
Inside the venerable stone building converted decades ago
to apartments for those of a certain age,
clearly visible at ground level,
a companion-cat (younger more vigorous than the tenants)
huddles, comically like his owner, close to the baseboard heat.
But way up high, where the roof is peaked,
and the windows wear hats,
an anxious face rimmed with scanty gray hair,
a fragile form, half-shadow, half-woman or man,
watches, dismayed, the insolent, fast developing storm,
and wonders if the poor little garden below,
that this newcomer has robber,
will ever be able to grow back again.
Laura Scribner, Goshen
Readers: Feeling stirred? Post your poetry at dirt-mag.com or email editor.dirt@strausnews.com. We’ll publish our favorite poem in the magazine.
Laura Scribner, Goshen
Readers: Feeling stirred? Post your poetry at dirt-mag.com or email editor.dirt@strausnews.com. We’ll publish our favorite poem in the magazine.
I seek you
through poison ivy
on the shoulders of roads.
Reaching through brambles
my fingers stretch out
to capture you.
You have lain here
through sunshine
and rain,
in ditches, in thorns,
in water and crushed
by the mower.
Who was the last person
who held you?
Were you thrown to your repose
by a teen eating candy?
Or tossed from the cab of a truck
by a man after work?
They let you become litter,
flaunting some misguided
freedom
to toss things out of the car,
talking and laughing
and looking away.
All you I have gathered –
water bottles still full,
Styrofoam cups for coff ee and
cream,
bags for Doritos
and cans for soda and Bud –
I haul to my driveway.
Whoever threw you away on the
road
should know that I throw you
out, too,
as they could have done,
into the garbage, the recycle bin;
because I want order,
consideration
for mother earth and a view
that is pleasant in this little
village
where we all live.
– Anne Hanson, Florida
Photo by Heather Mormile
Readers: Feeling stirred? Post your poetry at dirt-mag.com or email editor.dirt@strausnews.com. We’ll publish our favorite poem in the magazine.
If I were a leaf abruptly dismissed
by the haughty old maple tree
opposite my place
on a morning like this,
I hope I would have the good luck to be
a leaf of the practical, unsentimental kind,
that never, but never, looks behind.
Then I could not be tempted
to glance, one more time,
at yesterday’s companions, who insist
upon trying to keep house as though
new autumn winds did not exist;
nor would I let my gaze roam
to south limb number three,
fearing I might start to wonder,
where, right now, is the decent robin couple
whose nest stands foolishly bare?
Also, I would not naively admit
that hoarse goodbye cries from Canadian geese
can be missed.
– Laura Scribner, Goshen
Painting by Mary Sealfon, Monroe
Backyard Retreat by Dennis Fanton
Every year we reclaim the garden from growth
gone wild, and every year it stakes its claim again:
mustard seed, wild phlox, forget-me-not, fleabane—all
speak a florid language in rebuke: Indifference, Unanimity,
True Love, Variety; even the dandelion is an Oracle.
But a garrulous nature confuses the issue—profusion
in the service of what? A sprawling self-regard?
We prune and hack and dig, treating all weeds as verbs,
replacing them with the proper nouns we choose:
impatiens, vinca, iris, morning glory, sunflower, cosmos.
In the evening we sit in the eye of the storm, complacent,
serene, as if it were we who were growing so naturally
on water, sunlight, and the nutrients of the humus.
We plant ourselves in the garden, in our green chairs,
and scrutinize the hours with a practiced eye.
What was it like to be alive this golden day?
We hardly know, except moment by moment when
the minute hand stops on the kitchen clock or
the seconds divide. What time is it? As if
there were many kinds of time to discern.
Time to go in, time to get up, time to get going—
these are the parts of speech nature leaves out
in the headlong cyclic surge we call the world.
How are we to survive? We drain, irrigate, till,
we sow and harvest—we celebrate—and so live.
– Paul Kane, Warwick
painting by Nancy Reed Jones
by Mary Makofske
I leave the formal garden of schedules
where hours hedge me, clip the errant sprigs
of thought, and day after day, a boxwood
topiary hunt chases a green fox
never caught. No voice calls me to order
as I enter a dream of meadow, kneel
to earth and, moving east to west, second
the motion only of the sun. I plant
frail seedlings in the unplowed field, trusting
the wildness hidden in their hearts. Spring light
sprawls across false indigo and hyssop,
daisies, flax. Clouds form, dissolve, withhold
or promise rain. In time, outside of time,
the unkempt afternoons fill up with flowers.
© originally published in Poetry and included in Traction, forthcoming from
Ashland Poetry Press in November, 2011
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