Warm Moist Soil
June 8 2014

To plant a garden in spring.

To clear standing stalks
caught by snow.

Dig your hands
into warm moist soil.

Nest miracle seeds
in mother earth,
tamped down
with just enough firmness.

In a straw hat
under hot sun,
buzzing bugs
circling.

Has little to do with harvest.
The tomato you will pluck, still warm.
The green frills of kale
that surprise you with their sweetness.
The technicolor carrot
as it emerges,
crunchy, fat

blinking back
unaccustomed light.

It's all about process, journey, moment;
not deferred gratification
but this very stuff.
You tend, bend your back
feel close to the soil,
doing, until it's done.
Water and weed, and things will grow
no matter what.

It is day one
of this year's garden.
After you've patiently watched

your small fenced plot
filling with snow,
waited for winter to pass.
Which gets longer, and harder
the older you grow,
even though time goes fast.

And now, at last
the heady smell
of loamy soil,
hot sun at your back. 

This is a poem that needs absolutely no explanation. So I'll just note that I tried to infuse it with sensation, physicality, and the satisfied feeling of manual labour. ( ...I'll also say that I'm picturing my next door neighbour, Connie Latimer, hard at work!)

I also can't help pointing out a clever internal rhyme; one that is probably too clever to be noticed! But I smile inwardly when I read "earth"/"firmness"/"circling"/"emerges"/ and "deferred". Just sayin'!

Incidentally, the poem carries on the theme of "being in the moment", from the previous poem (Water-Bug). In the same spirit, I quite like the gardener's practical philosophy of deferred gratification: that gardening is not only an act of faith, but its own reward. And further to faith, I would have liked to say more about the miracle of seeds: these small self-sufficient worlds that contain the miniature of a life, like a puny plant homunculus; all the instructions and nutrients in a tiny indestructible package. In the practice of gratitude (as well as poetry) , a good part is observing the miraculous in the everyday.

A lot to say, for a poem in need of nothing!