Gardening

This is the free poem for the November 2024 crowdfunding Creative Jam. It was inspired by a prompt from fuzzyred. It also fills the "green / yellow" square in my 11-1-24 card for the Sleepytime Bear Bingo fest. This poem is about autumn and gardening.


"Earthlove"


In autumn, the Earth
changes her robes.

The long green grass
turns to yellow, to gold,
and fades to beige.

Flowers cast off
their colorful petals
so their brown heads
may shed seeds on
the quickening wind.

The green leaves of
the trees turn orange,
burn red, and fly away
like shining sails.

Everything smells
of spice, the air,
the falling leaves,
the wood waiting
to become smoke.

Squirrels scamper
through the treetops,
gathering acorns and
walnuts against winter.

Finches twitter and
whistle as they dangle
from the brown flowerheads,
pecking out the tiny seeds,
swallowing some of them
but always dropping others.

The gardeners, too, move
through the fields of gold
and brown, gathering seeds.

Cooling wind tugs at hats
tied on with strings, and makes
the long sleeves flap like sails,
like colorful autumn leaves.

With love and patience,
the gardeners take up
the seeds and save them
in envelopes, like letters to
themselves, or press them
into the black bosom of
the rain-wet ground.

The Earth gives, with
unconditional love,
gives everything
with no expectation.

The gardeners plant,
with unconditional love,
with abiding gratitude,
not with expectation, but
with unshakable faith

that spring will come.