Saturday, February 15, 2014

The Garden Gate


The Garden Gate

Children ride the garden gate
Not aware it might unhinge.
That chore of worry is for watchful parents
Standing somewhat crooked
Back-pressed by a gloved hand-heel
In the bountiful row of red tomatoes.
The garden work of children simply
The squealed glee of childhood.
Innocence experimenting with the squinching
Rusted hinge calling all able hands
To Summer’s sweet whiffs
Musky soil harrowed around
The tempting fruits of waning daylight.

Within each gardener
A sense of reward for daily toil
Far from the pleasured memories
Those layering childhood lessons
Stamped in the blossoming minds
To be carried long as remembered times.

The baskets of vegetables,
Those wide brimmed wire-handled, leg-spreading
Heavy, back heaving woven carriers
Filled with color;
Red, green, or orange,
And textures;
Hairy, prickly, or smooth and of scents
Sour, sweet, acrid or erotic.
No child of a gardener goddess
Forgets those pussy-willow soft years
Leading up to gardening as “dirty” teenage chore.

Each sensation of a grandmother’s garden
Is stored and binds family as one life.
A place where shredded, sliced and diced
Offerings are tasted and liked or “patooeed”;
When family dinners exhaust words muttered mouthed-full,
And family rituals, no matter how seldom
Shared, are felt as certainty and pride of relatedness.

With time the gate hinge opens
Others go in and out
Creating their own world
Trying new angles of light, water and seeded soil.
Children walk off to school, then fly
Driving away from graduation,
Shedding rice after sworn vows,
Bearing children and someday too,
Fixing the gate and tilling  good soil.

Then once upon a day
A life nears closing time.
 The elder assumed family journalist
The one always outside the pictured
Rituals that make family a house-hold
Is stricken and changed.  Her body turns on her mind.
Where once she stood erect and watchful,
Where measured stride was effortlessly fluid and wild,
Where yard-sticked new ones  measured inches of pride.
And  too, those children now parents
Still offered hard earned confidence
A salve on a world of impossible sprains
For those parents of children growing to soon wise.

No longer bent above the rows,
Unable to hoist the wire-handled harvest to wagon
She stands by, unable to wildly swing the hammock held child.
Somehow the new squealers seem more joyful
To the greying grandmother.
And time offers no reward for a life pressed hard
Against decades of twisted and turned
Cucumber vines of career journeys--
A new set of children dirtied in new-turned rows
Their houses now in towns
More rooms but less dirt for the growing plot.
Places where no gate harbors the harvest
For the new faces and voices.

Then, a gift is offered.
And a life becomes memories of that specially rolled crust--
The perfect golden custard squash pie;
A measured life goes beyond prime fruitfulness.
Courage enlightens through an unpredictable
Fractured future to become wisdom gifted. 
At last, she is released from knowing when to let
The tortured body’s clock unwind, when to leave
The chase in the biological accounts of young stout hearts.

When do we let the land have its way with us?
When will it take back its fuel for its perpetual renewal?
Maybe after hearing one last time, “Close the gate,”
As though the sanctity of humanity needed secure latching.

She holds us now to a silent creed;
An ancient nurturing instinct, a dance
Ever so gently and gaily performed and taught.
Her grace spoken:
“Enter the garden lovingly.
Swing on the gate you little rascals. 
Sprout and continue my never-ending story.”



2 comments:

  1. I'm starting to be able to taste this garden/farm of which you write on here. Written from the heart but also from the guts!
    Funny, too, I wrote a longish poem when I was in college using that motif of a swinging gate. I don't think I really knew what I was writing, but I was excited to be writing anyway.

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  2. Ela: some time has passed and now a reply. I have found a vessel for my love again. And the gate swings again as we both love gardening. "The circle is a wheel and it can streal someone who is a friend", yet sometimes the circle is kind. I hope my latent reply finds you and finds you well.

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