Parking Lot
There’s a beauty out here that you newcomers can too easily miss
in the midst of that hustle and hurry the world supposes of you.
There’s a garden here, a garden full of contemporary temporary
delights, delights for the senses – the touch and taste of our times.
See the rows fill in – color and shape, make and model arranged
And rearranged at the gardeners’ whim, plotted and planted for now.
This is as mapped and pre-measured as any Tudor cottage garden,
but on a scale that only the most robust city planner could fathom.
These are our willful flowers, the gardens we’ve made for our world,
the bulbs and the beds, the last of our edens and our gethsemanes.
Out here we still hunt and gather, we careen and watch so carefully,
exercise the full range of emotions – from hope, to despair, to ecstasy.
Out here we older members hold back, knowing luck and chance work
as well as your narrowing and harrowing, your sowing and horn blowing.
Out here, for once, we know our place: next row over, third from the end.
It’s not what we’re born to, it’s what we’ve learned, it’s what we’ve earned.
J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Write Room, Black Mirror, Foliate Oak, Third Wednesday, and Up the River.