*Sestina for a Connecticut Farmer in Springtime
Spring planting requires a kind of insanity,
A willful surrender to solitude,
Resignation to worship all that is vegetable,
From thaw to first frost. The farmer surveys her acreage, whispers
Prayers for fruits from her labor as, in her mind,
She tallies the needs for the season of growth:
What mixture of soils will make the beans grow?
Aid cucumber vines in their clambering insanity?
She keeps in mind
The need for solitude,
Sunlight, water, a whisper
Of wind to tempt vegetable
Blossoms into secret, powdery sex—vegetable
Love—from which fruitlets will grow.
But sometimes it takes more than whispered
Romance, like a farmer’s insane
Fixation with fixing fences, to offer the plots some solitude
From marauding deer; trapping woodchucks; minding
Honeybee hives. Her mind
Floods with plans for irrigation and grafting, vegetable
Varietals, hilling potatoes. Yet in the solitude
Of the fallow fields lies a tangle of weeds grown
Rank and lanky in their quiet insanity—
Rhizomes eagerly creeping, whispering:
Rest. Sleep. Leave us be. Leafy spurge, burdock, thistles whisper:
It is still early. Pay us no mind.
To ignore the infestation would be insane,
Certain death to vegetables
Overcome, overgrown
By invaders. Rest. Sleep. Give us solitude.
Hack the pests from the rocky loam—solitude
They cannot have. Disregard spiteful whispers
By neighbors who sow seeds of discontent that grow,
Like weeds, through pleasant pastures only if allowed. Be mindful
That uncaged tomatoes, untied snap pea tendrils, unkempt rows of vegetables,
Can also cause insanity.
Tamp the insanity contained in each seed into the earth with a whisper
Of hope. Cultivate solitude. Never mind
The sting of neighbors or nettles. Help the vegetables grow.
Sestina [Oxford Dictionary,] “a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words appearing in the closing three-line envoi.”
Poem for Vera to Read Aloud
Blame Miriam and her cup, or
Eric and his rounded praise
(or don’t place blame at all) as
round we come to
my turn at the Haggadah.
I read slowly.
I pronounce with diction.
My trilling Rs
distract us from
our hunger for haroset,
roasted egg,
horseradish,
the bright, round orange
anchoring the Seder plate.
The dog, Lola, weaves between our legs
under this laden table
as I unravel the threads of a story
un-spooled for
centuries by
millions.
Minus six million.
This accent, in case you are curious,
combines the Germany of my ancestors
with the Argentina of my youth.
Bavaria. Das Hinterland. Die Tür ist offen.
Buenos Aires. El próximo año en Jerusalén.
Did you know? The most dangerous animal in Africa
is the hippopotamus, killing far more each year
than the lion,
the rhino—
a fact that seems as out of place as
this brilliant orb of orange.
And yet I cannot imagine this table setting without it.
Grey Sparrow Journal 