Recycling a Well-Tended Garden
She side-bends and stoops
after decades of puttering limber-up
work-in-dirt yoga, knee bends to growing graces.
Her garden sprawls on its back,
open palms to June sun, humming
a hover and rest like the blue darner.
Her fingers spread compost,
sifting the strumming
of vegetable patches into mantras –
mantras learned in years of garden work –
Welcome guests –
flyers, buzzers, diggers, peckers, chewers.
Love is green. Nothing clashes with it.
Every worm is worth rescuing.
Wisdom does not come easily; dirty fingernails do.
Weeds ask how we got here.
Sing without fear. Soil knows eccentricity.
Wiggle in womb water.
Seed packets recycle
like wishes.
Though minds wander
from memory to future sight,
gardens stay put.
***
Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet who has maintained a garden all her life, sowing the seeds of sanity. She grew up admiring her mother’s roses and vegetable garden. She is an Oregon State University Master Gardener. Her chapbook Urban Wild is available from Amazon and focuses on interactions between humans and wildlife in urban habitat. Her book Ocean’s Laughter will be out from Aldrich Press in spring of 2016. The poetry in Ocean’s Laughter reflects on environmental issues related to a small town on the Oregon coast. For links to many published poems, visit website: triciaknoll.com
