For a snowy Sunday in Denver: Two garden poems from recent issues of The New Yorker

October 25, 1:56 PMDenver Flower and Gardening ExaminerColleen Smith

For my time and money, The New Yorker ranks among the finest magazines published in the United States. The weekly include works by our finest writers—not to mention the photography, art and, of course, the cartoons. Each issue includes poetry, too; and I’m sharing from recent issues two thought-provoking poems about gardening.                                                           Photo by Quincy Benton 

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

(With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe.)

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied – our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure – don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive

By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that blind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

-- Wendell Berry

* * *

Gardening in Cardoso

Wildflowers become weeds
In this small triangular
Garfagnana garden
Where I uproot herb Robert,
Spurge, wall-devouring
Valerian, garlicky
Ramsons, dead nettles.
What about oregano,
No high than dogs’ piss,
And pennywort protecting
The lizard’s hideaway?
I cut back the wild fig tree,
Its roots under the casa
Squeezing our water pipes,
Dozy snails its only fruit.
From acacia—beeless,
Unrelieved—a sexual
Heaviness marries me
And five old women—last
In the village to change
The Whitsun rosary next
Door at San Rocco’s shrine.
I leave them shepherd’s purse’s
Seedpods—little hearts
Spoon-shaped petals on spikes.

For more info: If you like literary garden entries, return to my home page and find my category list. Click on the entry "Literary Garden" or "Garden Quotes," and you will find more posts like this one.

For more on Wendell Berry, described as "the prophet of rural America," click here now. For the record, Mr. Berry disapproves of computer technology.

Colleen Smith began writing her first novel, Glass Halo, in the era of dinosaurs and typewriters.
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