Photo by Lisa Morris
When we lived
in Indiana, I had my first opportunity to do serious gardening. The previous
owners had had a large garden of annual crops, a fact that made it easier for
me. I planted lots of tomatoes, green beans, snow peas, watermelon, and other
produce. I loved working outside, especially in the cool of the evening.
Breezes and birdsong blessed me as I turned the soil, planted seeds, weeded
and, eventually, harvested.
I had to
start over when we moved to Illinois, gardening a much smaller plot that had not
been gardened before. I decided to create a small herb garden outside the
kitchen door. The herb garden was well-organized, until the year radiation
therapy sapped my energy. I wrote this poem:
The Year
the Herbs Went Wild
When breezes
blew, sage and mint
shook seeds
into the air.
They went
wild, planting their offspring
in the
daffodil patch, choking the mums,
filling the
space between onions
and beans,
leaping to the ground
beneath the
gas grill.
Why did I
allow this insurgency,
this rank
attempt to take over
the garden?
Perhaps because surgery
and radiation
left me no energy
for coping
with recalcitrance,
with
over-abundance. Or perhaps
I couldn’t
bear to be the surgeon
cutting into
something so alive.
~ Wilda
Morris
First
published in SecondWind, #5 (Summer 2005).
My poem deals
with gardening on a literal level, but seeks meaning beyond what happened to
the garden itself. Bonnie Wehle was thinking more metaphorically when she wrote
the following garden poem:
Gardening
This is my
season for gleaning,
for tending
the orchard of denial,
memory,
truth, lies.
Pulling weeds
of hurt, anguish,
leaving
blooms of glory, joy.
Sowing seeds
of could-have-been
unable to
germinate in a neglected plot.
Please, stop
sending me postcards from reality,
I am too busy
gardening to read them.
~ Bonnie Wehle
From Interiority by Bonnie Wehle (© 2013).
(Poems are
the property of the poets. Do not reproduce them without permission).
The July Poetry
Challenge
The July
Poetry Challenge is to write a poem on the theme of gardening. It can be
literally about gardening. Have the rabbits eaten more than their share of your
lettuce? Do your children help in the garden? Do you have a special love for
home-grown tomatoes? Do you lament that you can no longer garden as you once
did? Do you have a plot in a community garden? Do you and your neighbors
communicate across the fence as you work in your gardens? Or maybe you want to
write about a formal garden you have visited in your town or elsewhere in the
world.
On the other
hand, as Wehle’s poem suggests, gardens and gardening are a rich source of
metaphor and simile. What do those roses you grow represent to you? What is
gardening like? Use your creativity as you focus in some way on
gardening/gardens/the gardener/or the fruit, vegetables, or flowers grown in a
garden.
Unless your poem is in a form traditionally not titled, such
as haiku, it should be titled.
If your poem has been published you may submit it if you retain copyright, but please
include publication data. This applies to poems published in books, journals,
newspapers, or on the Internet. Note that this is a change in the rules.
The deadline is July 15. Poems
submitted after the deadline will not be considered. There is no charge to
enter, so there are no monetary rewards; however winners are published on this
blog. Please don’t stray too far from “family-friendly” language. No
simultaneous submissions, please. You should know by the end of the month
whether or not your poem will be published on this blog. Decision of the judge
or judges is final.
Copyright on each poem is retained by the poet. If a winning
poem is published elsewhere later, please give credit to this blog.
How to Submit Your Poem:
Send one poem only to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for “dot”) . Include a brief bio which can be printed with your poem, if you are a winner this month.
Send one poem only to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for “dot”) . Include a brief bio which can be printed with your poem, if you are a winner this month.
Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be
posted on the blog if it is a winner, so be sure that you put your name
(exactly as you would like it to appear if you do win) at the end of the poem.
Poems may be pasted into an email or sent as an attachment (no pdf files,
please). Please do not indent the
poem or center it on the page. It helps if you submit the poem in the format
used on the blog (Title and poem left-justified; title in bold (not all in
capital letters); your name at the bottom of the poem). Also, please do not use
spaces instead of commas in the middle of lines. I have no problem with poets
using that technique; I sometimes do it myself. However I have difficulty
getting the blog to accept and maintain extra spaces.
Poems shorter than 40 lines are generally preferred. Also,
if lines are too long, they don’t fit in the blog format and have to be split,
so you might be wise to use shorter lines.
Bio: Bonnie Wehle began writing serious
poetry somewhat late in life. She has self-published a book of her poems and
has had her work published in Sandcutters Poetry Journal of the Arizona
State Poetry Society and in a couple of online journals. She was an award
winner in the Arizona State Poetry Society’s annual contest in 2015. Bonnie has
participated poetry workshops at Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,
U. S. Poets in Mexico in Oaxaca, and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in Del Ray
Beach, Florida, as well as at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in
Tucson, Arizona, where she also serves as a docent.
© Wilda Morris
Photo by Lisa Morris