Garden Poems

“Your flowers look beautiful,” my husband says, looking down on my raised beds from our bedroom window, three stories above.

This has been a rough week. This is the time of year I regret signing a contract for another year of teaching. The students and my preparation for teaching them subsumes everything else that, frankly, means more to me — writing, cooking, snuggling my small children, and gardening.

“The garden looks so pretty,” my husband goes on, and I snap at him. “It’s not supposed to look pretty.” The flower beds out back aren’t meant for beauty, not outdoors, at least. They host my cutting garden, and the colors are running rife because I don’t have the bandwidth to go out and cut and bring in the blooms.

~

We begin this week’s cluster of poems smack dab in the middle of gardens. Right off the bat, Forugh Farrokhzad’s “I Pity the Garden” thrusts us into a neglected garden, dying in the sun-scorching heat. There are many layers to this poem, many potential points of analysis, but I am tired and able only to step amid the verses in a literal manner. I love the way poetry allows for that. Whether these lines are about an actual garden or a larger, fraught life, Father, Mother, Sister, Brother each have different approaches to the care or abandonment of growing things, varying reasons and excuses. So do I. We are moving through a life that frays at the edges, and existence itself feels forlorn at the moment. I read this poem and feel, at the very least, less alone in my small, momentary despair.

“The Egoist” in Pablo Neruda’s garden comes next and pushes at the boundaries of interpretation, too. But again, I walk among his no-longer-growing things in a literal manner, in winter now, rather than scorched summer:

It’s the hour
when leaves fall, triturated
across the ground, when
out of being and unbeing they return to their source,
their gold and green stripped away
until they’ve gone to root again
and again, undone and reborn,
they lift their heads into spring.

And suddenly I remember the concept of seasons, of coming and going, of everything having its time that will cycle back again. (Tomorrow is the beginning of fall, after all.) What overwhelms me today — not least my new crowd of students’ needs and desires and difficulties and very personhoods — may change and modulate sweetly for me next month, or next schoolday: “Oh heart lost / within me, in my own investiture, what sweet modulations people you!” The other aspects of my life that are being crowded out by what feel like weeds will find their time in my days again. It has been true before, and the seasons never fail to cycle.

The next poem in line is an arboreal garden. Robert Frost’s country narrator is approached by a city fellow who offers him thirty dollars for the trees in his woods — a “thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!” But at news of how little remuneration this fellow would give for the bounty of his forested land, the narrator decides he will never sell for such a pittance. He would rather give the trees freely to his friends, instead: the deeply-felt difference between transactional gain and bounteous, others-centered loss.

We begin this week’s reading in the middle of gardens, and we must backtrack into last week’s poems to get the full effect. Last week, Sara Barkat left us with “Dreaming Backwards”: the “sustenance of green” and “Life despite” weather that turns with the shifting of seasons. Remembering the flourishing that was, and the “tragedy of un-thinned lettuce” or un-cut flowers in my own back beds turns into its own kind of hope. These things will all come again, as will my chance to return to cooking and writing and relaxed family life, and I am able to agree now with L.L. Barkat about the scent “of death upon / the leaves”:

how lovely
the fragrance.

~

I want you to know that I went out and clipped a Mason jar’s worth of zinnias this morning, and they are sitting on the windowsill next to the place I type. I want you to know that while I reached and snipped and bent and reached again, the Sara Teasdale Week One lines “hush me and heal me when I am very tired” ran through my thoughts over and over again, like a liturgy, like a prayer of gratitude. I want you to know that I sometimes feel the reality of my students’ various selves too deeply, especially at this time of year, and I wail with Neruda, “What can I do if the star picked me / for its lightning, and if the thorn / pointed out to me the pain of all those others.” Then I feel broken-windowed, and the necessary neglect of the other works I am made for harries me. In “Home and the Homeless,” Elizabeth Woody’s “wear of traffic says we are out of time, / must hurry,” and I feel a frantic homelessness within myself.

I want you to know that this morning, I went out and clipped a jar of zinnias, and, though it was flowers, not trees, I felt Jane Hirschfield’s “immensity [tap] at my life.” I went out to my garden, and though it was not sundown, as in Kate Seymour MacLean’s “The Sabbath of the Woods,” there was “benediction and release.”

Your Turn

We’re reading Earth Song: a nature poems experience together.  

More Threads: trees, dark and night, light and lights, eschewing knowledge for experience. Which threads have I missed?

The Poem I Wish I Had Time to Talk About: “River Song.” No! “Sorrow Gondola No. 2.” No, no: Whitman’s “Learn’d Astronomer” and “The Migration of Darkness” excerpt and Tagore’s call to “Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads.” Or else Hopkins’s “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” or maybe “I Wake You from a Dream of Winter.” You see the difficulty. Please ease my mind and bring any of these or the other poems of the week to the forefront in your comments!

Lines That Stop You in Your Tracks: For me, it’s those Neruda lines, “What can I do if the star picked me for its lightning” – so evocative! Which lines moved you most? 

Reading Schedule

September 7th p. 13-41 (“From the Editor” through “The Woodpile”)
September 14th p. 42-66 (“Tornado Warning/Joann Fabric & Craft” through “Scent”)
September 21st p. 67-95 (“I Pity the Garden” through “Home and the Homeless”)
September 28th p. 96-126 (“The Oak Desk” through “The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs”)

Photo by Gabriel Caparó, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Rebecca D. Martin.

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Rebecca D. Martin

Rebecca D. Martin's essays and poetry have been published variously and can be found here. Of all the places she’s lived, Asheville, North Carolina, feels most like home. She now lives in Central Virginia with her husband and two young daughters, where she writes poetry, essay, memoir, and YA fiction, teaches high school American Lit, and reads like she’s running out of time.

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