There’s simply no use trying
to grow a garden here. Not the way tomato
vines relax in the summer heat
and rot with each heavy rain.
Not the way corn stalks
lay flat with another hard wind,
or the way cucumber vines wilt in this
humidity. Down in the soil
the carrots grow fat and pithy,
come up with a rotten taste. And radishes
gone to seed split their sides
as though the bright skins
cannot hold all that blistering, white flesh.
All the while the half-turned
pumpkins twist off their stems
and go pale and flat against the earth.
I have never seen a picture
of the school, surely wood and rotting
even when my grandfather gazed
at the oil-slicked paper panes
that must have one night
caught fire and glowed in this valley,
hot and bright as the balled fist
of the sun punching its way up
from the ridge. And so
the abandonment, these toys
that will only allow themselves
to resurface a few every year.
They are the tiny, whispered
secrets of children, the only things
that persist, like multi-floral rose
brambling through the horse pasture,
choking off the chance
for anything else to grow.
And yet here is the cauliflower,
a huge white brain
continuing its dreams. Here
is the holy cabbage, folding hand
over hand in prayer that this year
there will be enough to feed us all.
-David B. Prather
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