“Gardens are creations, they are children, they are what we build to decorate and nourish our lives. They are the connections by which we measure all things that happen.”
What it is to grow a garden in the Age of Terror
is a collection of poems that chronicles my own life’s journey with gardens.
Coming soon from Fernwood Press
Selected poem
Breath taken
When I struggled the most hauling or spreading or tilling or potting sweat beading soil like coffee grounds crusting my nails I’d get angry at sickness, at plague at virus, little bugs here fungus there, leaves partially chewed from worms, and of course deer that left nothing untouched his smoke like death curls leaving the screen on a mission to trounce the scent of the dew he’d say How’s it going out there? on his porch in his chair, the garden alive and staring my speech numb now I believe I should have said It’s goingthe way of the smoke.
Wonder led us out of caves gave our hands tasks allowed our brains to ponder
Our connections to landscapes produce the thoughts and revelations that form the core of our human experience –
We think great thoughts But would never presume to be In Einstein’s Head
Before splitting into fronds of palms the tree grows one tall stalk that juts straight into the sky, upon which on this day a crow sits at tippy top and I, standing where observers lodge, watch it as kindred folk. This crow rules on the edge of its point, knows the silliness of commanding from the unsteady summit. He does it anyway. We are the same. My summit, I tell him, is higher. Gravity does not ask whose perch is grander.
Featured poem
Why I’ll Miss the Hens
I never thought about them, the hens who are sick and dying of bird flu, until I heard talk of Easter and people said the potatoes will have to be dyed instead and I wondered if dye would take to a potato or would the skin repel it, as if knowing it were second rate? I thought of the egg-o-mat egg vending machine that sat on a farm in New Jersey where the industrious feathery hens laid eggs plentiful, that were purchased with a swing of a nob and that was when my partner texted that he got the last crate of a dozen and I said geez, I’ll miss the hens, the mothers of eggs not because of Easter and not because I’ve known hens or raised hens but because they are the birds of stories and poetry, life and nourishment, rebirth, renewal they are why the rooster crows, I’ll miss the way they firmly place themselves in their nests eggs warm and safe mothers who came first to guard their bounty abundant, once, as caressing as human touch.
