For the grandmother teaching the children how to plant seeds in the community garden
Poems
- Complete Poetry Publication List
- The oldest lobster fisher in the world says she might as well keep doing it
- A Reckoning With Johnny Appleseed
- The sparrows (Once again, I was wrong)
- For the grandmother teaching the children how to plant seeds in the community garden
- Substitutions for Buttermilk
- Make Believe
- For the students
- An Answer
- The scientist and the poet
- A 10-year old boy finds a stick on a field trip to the beach
- Clutch
- Erosion
- Piano lessons
- On the Impermanence of Tools
- The Photographer
- A Deeper Pretending
- After days of deep grief
- The News
- How I Wanted to be Beautiful
- Gathering stones
- Writing on Mother’s Day
- Learning to Fish
- Every day something new
- Insights from Arthropods
- Defensible Space
- Turtles at the Convention Center
- Spring Hatch
- On the evolution of shadows
For the grandmother teaching the children how to plant seeds in the community garden
“Just a little bit, they only
need to go down an inch,
make a small hole, use your pinkie,
put the seeds in,
gently, gently.”
Elders pass on practice with invocation of earth under fingernails
It doesn’t matter so much if the rows are straight
so long as we remember ourselves.
We can spend a day like this, or a life,
let afternoons pass under
shifting light and swollen clouds.
Plants need no permission, only our exhale,
sunbeams, a thin veil of rain.
How many more hopeful acts do we have left?
After a thousand tragedies,
sleepless nights staring up at the rafters,
the ground beneath
is waiting to begin again,
the seeds will still be true.
—
Originally published in Thimble Literary Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 2
©2024 EMILIE LYGREN
