The Gardener
This time of year again –
doing the work we must bend to or kneel,
like the man rising at evening
from the furrows he’s been digging all day,
his hands muddy with planting,
patting the earth tenderly into place
around each nameless seed.
Along the lane, the rain-washed body
of a hare, blackthorn flowering overnight.
Time to be turning in he thinks
as he gazes at a sowing of early stars
with eyes just the colour you remember.
*Esther Morgan's third collection Grace,
published by Bloodaxe, is due out in October 2011. She is an editor and
historic recordings manager for The Poetry Archive. She currently lives
in rural Norfolk where she's waiting for another new arrival – her
first baby due in June.
‘And The Hyacinth’s in Bloom – A Lovely Blue’
My mother’s sudden pride in flowers –
how our desert garden grows
now that our father’s gone,
now she has the time.
The shrouded mystery of bulbs,
veined globes of white:
the pale bulge of my father’s ankle bone,
and the startling, naked nub –
the knot and pit where once his toe had been.
Dry April soil fed slowly
with these relics, what is left of him:
long-tended, worn-out,
all their pruned-back cankers quiet now.
After the amputation, bruising, weariness,
this stony rest, his paradise,
my mother’s newfound flowers.
*Isobel Dixon
grew up in South Africa, and now lives in Cambridge, England. Her
collection A Fold in the Map is published by Salt. Her next collection,
The Tempest Prognosticator, comes out from Salt in July 2011.
This poem is from A Fold in the Map