Monday, October 21, 2013

IMUNURI Prompt: Harvest the Poem Garden

"Flower - Sunflower - Gardener's Toolbox" by Mike Savad
Respond to the following poem, "Seven of Pentacles" by Marge Piercy: "Weave real connections."
Extra experiential credit: While writing, put feet in the dirt. Fondle seeds. Put a harvested fruit or vegetable in your lap and breathe. Walk with a scythe. Feel the connections made. Have a pen and paper beside you. Write a poem.

remember the tags: poem, harvest, epic-earth, poet's moniker


The Seven Of Pentacles - Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
*****
An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...

1 comment:

  1. how delightfully synchronistic Scooter!!...i was pondering this card woefully yesterday...you've helped me to see it in a different and more empowering way. Thanks!

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