Days I Can Forget
Days I can forget, hour by hour,
pronging the soil with blunt points unfit for purpose.
Wrestling with bushes that bared teeth, bit back,
snipping at each to give it vigour and stimulate new shoots,
I think she said;
trimming the lawn-edge with precision,
picking out every wart by its milky stem, every Dandelion,
Daisy,
every smudgy buttercup that lit up my buttery chin;
untangling the network of bindweed that twined itself
around everything, then strangled it.
I would do all of this while she picked and hoed, chittered on.
She’d talk about each plant.
How the Snapdragon was an Antirrhinum
how the delicately perfumed Pansy signified love, so she’d been
told,
how the fuchsia grew outward like a tree, needed tighter
control.
And how the resplendent Magnolia, white for purity, brazen and
bold,
held its own in any garden.
She spoke, too, about the dirt,
how this land was ours to protect, ours to toil on.
It was hers pretty much.
Once, I dug up a haggard rose to make room, tugged at the roots.
The Blue Moon was the newest rose,
the last of their acquisitions.
Terry Phillips
If you have any thoughts about this poem, Terry Phillips
would like to hear them
