Day's Eyes

Throughout the pandemic I have felt unable to write much (or even read much). However, I wrote this love poem earlier this year, which I'm publishing for national poetry day which is today...

Day's eyes

When at my lowest I was told to look at nature…

“Who fathers the drops of dew?...

Look at the flowers…”

I thought a while over the question, from the thunder-voice.

“Is this going to be something about a garden?” I replied in the harvest-mouse squeak of my own voice.

Near silence then. But not quite. A gentle breeze sweeping through bamboo leaves as the day grows tired, his face growing older, like a green man.

Or the sound of the fluttering wings of a bat’s shadow in the dusk.

To find love and hope in a garden? To feel closer to the divine?

Gardeners unite I suppose.

To see the shining of emeralds and diamonds in the morning dew. Daisies opening their eyes to stare back at the sun, as if to stare him out.

Seated on grass that longs to be short in the secret sign and roar-pressure of the lawnmowers.

Or to find cobwebs like dewy-diamond necklaces.

Too ephemeral, too transient perhaps. Forever?

 

It was true though, there was a healing in the garden, but it made me think of the gardeners too. Gardeners clothed like flowers themselves.

Of my queen of the trees.

I couldn’t help but still find healing in the emerald day’s-eyes of this particular gardener, her skill and love growing with each passing year. With a patience which I didn’t really deserve either.

Her hands caked in the soil of my complaints. But my love for her remaining evergreen.

So yes, the thunder-voice was right. There is a healing in nature and in those who tend to her.

And in your day’s-eyes.