Heart’s Needle 2
by W. D. Snodgrass
Late April and you are three; today
We dug your garden in the yard.
To curb the damage of your play,
Strange dogs at night and the moles tunneling,
Four slender sticks of lath stand guard
Uplifting their thin string.
So you were the first to tramp it down.
And after the earth was sifted close
You brought your watering can to drown
All earth and us. But these mixed seeds are pressed
With light loam in their steadfast rows.
Child, we’ve done our best.
Someone will have to weed and spread
The young sprouts. Sprinkle them in the hour
When shadow falls across their bed.
You should try to look at them every day
Because when they come to full flower
I will be away.
Do you ever feel like you just can’t get ahead of the sequence in which the order of things would make sense? I wanted to plant a few fruit trees this spring, but the cold, wet, late spring has made that complicated. I got 6 trees planted yesterday, blustery, rainy mid-40’s cloudy day, perfect for bare root trees, not so perfect for the gardener. Now I have to figure out how to keep the deer off them until I can build a proper deer fence. All my intentions for positioning the orchard were thrown out the window by unexpected complications in designing a new septic field. We’ll see who wins, but it would have been so much easier if I could have built the fence first, then then plant the trees.
Fourteen Lines 