"Housewarming" by Elaine Smokewood read by Robert Henry
Channel: Remembering Dr. Elaine Smokewood, Poet and Teacher
Date: 2014-10-28

Housewarming by Elaine Smokewood

Wisteria, shrub rose, peony, rose-of-Sharon, day lily, crape myrtle:
a modest profusion of bloom makes one small space after another glow.
It’s the simplest sequece imaginable--

no drama whatever, nothing formal or complex, certainly no work of art, 
no gardener’s palette, not even, properly speaking, a garden--
nevertheless, one day years ago, when I was still a girl,

long before I drove toward this town, this house, someone--a wife
a mother, a daughter--planted, thoughtfully, skillfully, with fingers that now, perhaps, are stiff and swollen or shaking (or boxed up tight

and planted in the ground themselves) seeds
so there would always, somewhere in this yard,
be a small beautiful thing for me to see.

In my blind panic, I almost missed them, could only, in my first
weeks and months in this place, lop off limbs, pull up
vines that threatened my bricks and mortar:

It took flowers opening in a dream
to open my eyes
to what bloomed in my own backyard.

No matter. No manner of neglect, it seems, or violent misguided
attention can still them. They speak as if they have waited
for me to come: Sink down. Open up. Drink sun. Be home.