Community Garden

July 10 2015

In the community garden

people kneel

in rubber boots and floppy hats,

plunging calloused hands

into warm black soil.

Cultivate plants

in the allotted spot,

their fellow travellers

in adjacent plots.

In a city of concrete towers, walk-up flats

the renters, and transients

and temporarily landless

feel the urge to grow;

as if we were hard-wired

to prune, weed, hoe

glean, and gather.

There will be a harvest feast

of stunted carrots, blighted peas

that would have been so much easier

at the supermarket check-out,

where a cornucopia of vegetables

purged of imperfection

sell for cheap.

But it’s worth learning to farm,

immersing yourself

in the loamy smell, cool foliage,

sharing the earth

with slugs, cutworms

ravenous bugs,

aphids, sucking the guts

out of hard green tomatoes.

And urban strangers

from whom you’d normally turn away,

averting your gaze

as you hurry past.

Is worth

the grass-stained pants

and ground-in dirt

of work-worn fingers.

The puny carrot

that must have cost 5 bucks

but could never taste as sweet.

I read the words "community garden" (it was actually an illustrated piece in the daily paper about subway art in New York City), and was immediately struck with this idea of conviviality: the word "community" landing so much more forcefully than "garden". And then I pictured a smiling lady in a floppy hat, kneeling down in her plot and grinning up. So when the word "cultivate" came to mind, I naturally thought of found friends as much as plants. That was the start of the poem, and I let stream-of-consciousness take me from there.