We come and go,
but the land is always here.
And the people who love it
and understand it
are the people who own it
— for a little while.
~ Willa Cather
THE GARDEN
Now that the teenagers
have taken the house -
long legs, loud shoes, sarcastic
tongues, their paraphernalia
winding from chair
to floor to stair
like some perverse
unstoppable vine - I retire
to the garden.
Nothing here
talks back. I learn
a language the children
don't speak: lantana,
hosta, portulaca. I have gloves
but seldom use them.
I like the dirt
under my fingernails,
the roughness that comes
from pulling weeds,
churning the soil for new beds.
It's time
to pitch the rusty swing set,
to rid the shed of punctured
volleyballs, old bicycles,
a decade of water guns,
time to fill it with peat moss
and new tools:
spade, trowel, rake,
all shiny, all mine.
— Lee Robinson
from Hearsay, Fordham University Press
Poetry Garden
