This Year's Garden

 

This Year's Garden

 

 

We wanted, we planned for

tomatoes and cucumbers, okra, too

and three kinds of peppers,

basil for the bees, fennel and dill

for the flower-winged flyers,

so small and now so few.

We planted, and first the south wind came

in the child's light of April, a wild

graceless thing tearing and roaring,

ripping leaf from stem. So we built windbreaks

from old boards and rocks;

life obliged us and held on.

Then came the ruin of heat, four weeks early,

bringing a cloudless sun-blurr of blue

too cruel to call sky, as basil was sprouting

thick from last year's dropped seed.

So we rose every morning at daybreak

to water, a drink portioned by hour

bed by bed, scrawled on the calendar

so none were forgotten

for what is forgotten here dies.

From this we got a dozen tomatoes,

seven or eight cucumbers full

of hard, tough seeds, a thousand pepper blooms

that became a hundred peppers, and okra

past counting, stretching up and swaying

in its African dance while a forest

of basil trembled every daylight hour

with the nuzzling of bees. In August

we planted cabbage for fall cropping

while okra was still king, feeding us every night 

until the first frost came four weeks early,

having learned from the heat.

 

So we ordered hoops and row covers, and built

the cabbage a white room above the dirt.

Now I go out in the biting cold and pull the extra quilt

from their bed so the weak light can stroke them.

I look at the okra, brown poles on the compost,

remember the bees' tourmaline forest of herbs

 

that sprang up like star-wishes never told;

all these treasures whisper me their names,

alive for me under sun and moon,

loaning me breath for one more season.

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link #145

(a more literal take on Monday's Tending a Difficult Garden)

Basil Around the Bird Bath, August 2022

Inside The White Room, November 2022 both ©joyannjones

Lady Of Dead Leaves

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lady Of Dead Leaves

 

 

 

Beneath a dead leaf my love lies hidden

with a rose pearl and a starling's feather

where the dark forest unties Her ribbons

 

where night rides as black as robber's leather

with a bagful of moon's most starving hours

in a forest where leaves are falling forever,

 

whose balefires paint meteoric showers,

whose pale sprites teach old lovers to dance

and sew up their wounds with threads of flowers.

 

For grape never saw the wine She decants,

a vintage that ripens with dissolution

aged in a song, sealed with ash and chance.

 

Under the starlight's silver infusion

asleep as a bee in the fading thunder,

 which is volition and which illusion

 

when all that's left of life is to wonder

or lift the leaf that love is under.

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal

where I am pleased to host this week's challenge,

First Poems: Door to the Wilder Eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fairy Dance, © Arthur Rackham    Public Domain

Spring Beauty © Andrew Wyeth         Fair Use

Dead Silent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Silent

 

 

 

 The buzz cut off in the flower's throat,

the crunch of green in the hornworm's jaw

gone, and that was the first silencing.

The roadrunner's raspy morning cough,

the thud and peep of the grey toad's hop

stopped, the second silencing.

The bagpipe gliss too high to hear

deep in the whales' wet meadowlands,

the third thing silenced.

Science sucked into apathy's muck,

sense and sanity duct-taped dead: 

the brutish silencing.

 

The white noise of fools, the grinder's carouse of greed

eating greed, the barker's pitch for fresh trash and blood

plays loudest where breathing is silenced.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Compound Word Verse

at dVerse Poets

and earthweal's

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

gliss: abrv, glissando, a glide from one pitch to another

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wing Of A Blue Roller, 1512, Albrecht Durer   Public Domain

Untitled (Firetower) © Zdislas Beksinksi   Fair Use

October Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

October Light

 

 

 Many things 

are called lilies

which are not, yet these are,

still lilies

by October light

 

these graceless stalks

brown shriveled sticks

reaching dead hands

for the gone

 summer sky.

 

Time has burned them

the dry wheat's color,

taken their sundance of petals

scarlet and gold

yellow as morning,

 

even the memory of

that feasting scent

that 

drunked the bees.

Still lilies grow  

 

for October 

is the cup earth has made

 for midsummer's wine.

Seeds and stem

bulb and root, burnt or bright,

still lilies, alive by October light,

out of sight, and it's best you know

for pulling hands

always

kill what they sow.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

posted for Sherry Blue Sky's

Collateral Beauty at earthweal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: While it may look "messy," leaving the ground undisturbed in fall and the dead stalks of lilies and other flowering plants in the garden during winter is important in providing habitat for beneficial insects and certain pollinators like miner bees,which overwinter in the stems. See  Fine Gardening's Provide A Winter Home For Beneficial Insects  and Nesting and Overwintering Habitat for Pollinators: "While flowering plants provide pollinators with food, insects also require suitable shelter for nesting and overwintering. Most bees and wasps create small nests beneath the soil or within dead plant stems or cavities in wood."

 

 

 

Photos ©joyannjones,  2021

 

Friday Flash 55 for August 2020

Welcome all once again to the Friday 55. Another month of this ghastly year proceeds down the tubes, howling and gibbering, leaving us to endure and express it in our writing. I feel a twinge of embarrassment whenever I refer to having a kickass weekend this year, but I can't help feeling Galen Hayes, the originator of this meme, would not have hesitated, and indeed, would have done his best to see we all had one. 

So, the rules are unchanged. Write a poem, a prose-poem or a piece of flash fiction, using exactly 55 words, no more, no less. Link your URL in the comments, and I will be by to read what you have cooked up out of this month's witches brew. 

The prompt will be active from Thursday at midnight to Sunday at 4:00 PM CST.

 ~*~

Here is my 55:

Song For Summer's End

Catkins, willowskins,

grey geese in the morning

sky light,  V-flight,

feather-spin in the gloaming,

bee-fumble, leaves tumble

in Fall's honey-wind sighing

her kiss-clover slip over,

pollen days flying.

Pepper-dust, finger-rust;

summer's crone's crying

too late at the broken gate

where autumn's fast riding.

Even so nothing goes

that has a song to

hold it close.

August 2020 

 

Images: Bees circa 1900, © Ban Jiaoshi       Fair Use

The Autumn, 1896, © Alphonse Mucha    Fair Use

Last Roundup

Last Roundup

Remember me when I ran with my kind,

my hooves struck the prairie like a xylophone,

kicking up bees in the cowboy rose,

grazing the weave of sweetgrass stems,

red dirt-dancing in the south wind's eye.

Then you brought your infinite calves, 

wave after wave of threadbare sheep,

mines and guns and the oil machine

to steal the grass, to suck up the land,

to push and kill til the red stones weep.

Now that you've turned the bees to wind

now that you've turned the grass to sand

now that you've turned a dancer to meat

now that I've gone 

where the dead can't ask,

only horse-ghosts run while the sweetgrass longs

for the wild tap of hooves, the mustang's song.

 ~January 2020

 for earthwheel challenge

The Animals of Climate Change

Notes:You may wonder how this is related to climate change, but almost everything impacting animals negatively today is so related in one way or another. In this case, the climate of the West and Southwest plains has been growing rapidly more arid for several decades, increasing the stress put on the land to sustain the wild horse herds, native species like elk and deer, and cattle and sheep ranching populations. The public land areas are also feeling the push for oil and gas development, as well as unregulated trophy hunting. The ones to lose in this scenario are the wild horses.

More info:  The American Mustang is a feral horse that is descended from domesticated horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish in the 15th century, and is protected under the Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. Populations are "managed" by the Bureau of Land Management  who use a series of yearly round-ups and contraceptive measures plus an adoption program to keep mustang numbers down. While control of these populations is necessary to prevent over-grazing and over-population, the BLM's practices have been criticized time and again for cruelty, corruption and incompetence, while civilian animal welfare groups have relentlessly pushed to reform and control them, with mixed success. The BLM has been accused of turning a blind eye to mass "adoptions" where the horses are slaughtered for dog food, as well as for keeping large herds of animals penned up indefinitely without any plan for their fate other than eventual slaughter. 

Most recently under the Trump administration, things have swung round to the worse scenario level, as might be expected in a 'pay to play' government:

 from 2018:
 "The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) winter roundup season is upon us. The traumatic helicopter roundups that will be conducted this season are even more concerning than usual,  since every single wild horse captured is in danger of being killed or sold for slaughter.

Signaling its intent for America's wild herds, the BLM is planning to conduct numerous roundups simultaneously. The agency's increased capacity for rounding up horses endangers more lives and  proves problematic for advocacy organizations that intend to document the mass capture of mustangs from their homes on our public lands." ~American Wild Horse Campaign

from 2020:

 "The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is putting together the fiscal year 2020 roundup schedule. Once funding is approved by Congress in the fiscal 2020 debate...we may see the schedule explode to include up to 20K wild horses removed each year for the next 3-4 years. These will be the largest roundup schedules in history.

This will decimate existing populations. It is based on the severely flawed parameters of politics in the 1970’s and perpetuated through a program based on excuses and chaos ever since." ~Wild Horse Education

Photos: header © Bev Pettit, footer © Carol Walker  Fair Use