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