Outdoor days are back. Studies show that people feel better if they
spend just twenty minutes a day outdoors. I know I feel good after spending
time with plants.
“Recipe for a Curbside Strip” is an account of my efforts to keep a flower garden growing in a city by replanting the ground in front of our house after the city rebuilt our street and sidewalk.
Here's an excerpt:
Recipe for a Curbside Strip
Begin again in
Thanksgiving cold,
planting scores of
daffodil starters,
those fat spuds of
sunny potential,
in the city's gift
of much-pebbled soil
Wait five months
for the bloom,
add wild violets
transferred by hand from
the fertile,
weed-addicting earth of the perennial patches
out back,
plus other
nameless wildthings, weeds
and a prominent
invasive left to its own greedy device
Chip in some new
Covid-priced annuals
(everything pretty
much double this year)
Then out back
again to hunt up more ground-hugging
violets to
fill
a few shyly
embarrassed bare spots
like children with
too much flesh
for last year's
clothing
...
An excerpt from:
Of Course the Poet Wears a Mask
Everybody wears a
mask
the fender
polisher wears a mask
the metallurgist
the surgeon in his
lair
to guard against the spatter
The actor with his
shrewd demeanor
to take us into
his confidence...
Who am I today?
the player asks
the politician
with his broken staff
the weeping child
the disappointed
lover
the confident
despoiler
the rigger
the triggerman
...
And, finally from:
Accidental
Collaborators
She turned to me,
a look of distant rainbows
in her eyes
Kiss me, I said,
you fool
...
To read the poems in their entirety, go to
http://verse-virtual.org/2021/May/knox-robert-2021-may.html
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