Hunger
Nov 16 2014


The vegetable patch, flash-frozen
under a thin blanket of snow

is like a still life

of time lost.

Rows of broccoli still stand,
like stout green trees
beneath a soft white cover.

While ripe tomatoes are blasted,
branches grounded
vines collapsed.

And hardy kale, touched by frost
surprising in its sweetness;
frilly leaves, intact
as if they still basked
in August heat.

The carrots remain,

enclosed in warm dark earth

as if too bashful to emerge.
Orange flesh, aiming down,
like missiles, in underground bunkers

that will never launch.
They look perfectly preserved
but are soft and punky,
caught by winter
and left to rot.

The garden that was planted in spring
and missed its harvest
will remain all season
in winter's iron grip.

A frozen tableau

behind its sagging gate, chicken-wire enclosure,

waiting to be worked

into freshly thawed soil;

another hopeful crop.

Because in short sharp summer
we seed more than we can eat,
desperately hungry
to plant.
To put our hands
into newly warmed earth.

To tend the land
and watch things grow.


About 10 days ago the temperature dropped, and there was a good 3 inches of snow. So whatever was left in my neighbour's vegetable patch flash froze, and now sits under a thin blanket of snow like a simulacrum of summer, incongruous in the winter landscape. There is something touching about this tableau of abandoned hope, this materialized version of arrested time. (Those last 2 sentences came to me while writing this blurb, and I liked them so much I was tempted to shoe-horn the good bits into the poem. But realized that what works in prose is often too cumbersome for poetry. Or at least for my taste in poetry.)

I went next door to scavenge what I could of the leftover kale. I've found that kale touched by frost is remarkably sweet. I've been surprised at how hardy it is in the cold. Although this stuff is more than touched(!), so we'll see.

It was seeing the garden like this -- before it completely disappears under the inevitable accumulation of snow -- that gave me this poem. I have no idea what actually happened to the tomatoes, broccoli, or carrots; whether harvested, or not. So those descriptions are purely acts of imagination. I mostly followed sound: the short "a" of "flash" took me by the hand and led me through. And then my mind's eye descended and I saw carrots hiding out, enclosed in soil, where the frost had not yet penetrated. I couldn't resist the contrast of warm dark earth with its insulating blanket of snow.

The waste of unharvested produce struck me. But the reason is obvious, and it became the heart of the poem: that universal and overwhelming drive in a land of hard winters, late springs, and all-too-short summers to plant; to put our hands into warm earth, and see things grow.