Only silly things come to my mind like that I began to miss the earthy taste of soymilk last night around midnight. To spare the reader my adventures in the Őkoladen, I will divert their attention with a poem. I hope I don’t get shot for this, but I have a double excuse: it’s National Poetry Month in the US and this is an earthy poem.
In the evenings
I scrape my fingernails clean,
hunt through old catalogues for new seed,
oil workboots and shears.
This garden is no metaphor–
more a task that swallows you into itself,
earth using, as always, everything it can.
I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt
with leaf-mold and bulb,
plant into the oncoming cold.
Not that I ever thought
the philosopher meant to be taken literally,
but with no invented God overhead,
I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting
that ripens into soil,
in an old corm that rises steadily each spring:
not symbols but reassurances,
like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long-familiar book,
the known words barely listened to,
but joining, for all the nights of a life,
each world to the next.Jane Hirshfield, “November, Remembering Voltaire”
