IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S GARDEN

I was thinking of my grandmother 

who was more practical than prosaic, 

how she loved the fragments of beauty 

that the voracious deer didn’t devour.

It was a running battle with the roses, 

that climbed up the trees to escape their hunger.

What survived was whatever the deer wouldn’t eat.

Remember the daphne, with its variegated leaves, 

and the narcotic odor of lily-of-the-valley?

The deer ignored the poker plant on the bank. 

The pyracantha and hawthorn grew twisted

like the bay tree, to avoid their appetite.

It seems that the deer hankered after anything blue. 

Borage, forget-me-nots, violets, and houndstongue

slid down their throats in seconds flat.

Sometime my grandmother would hike up the hill 

to transplant wildflowers in the garden, 

wild irises and poppies guarded the lettuce beds

and hidden chard prayed among the rhubarb & potatoes.

She preferred the down-to-earth aspects of the garden

that fed us. She, having raised eight children, 

was a practical woman, and I was her ninth child, 

my half-brother, Guy, who arrived in a bassinet 

left on the doorstep one hot summer morning, 

was her 10th child. Then came along my cousin David 

for weeks at a stretch, followed by his sister, Sinead—

That brought it up to an even dozen children she raised.

Hunger was always at the forefront of her mind,

having inherited survivor’s guilt from the Irish Famine.

She lived on a half-pension, barely making ends meet. 

But we never wanted for food, or beauty either. 

It was never about yet another mouth to feed. 

She tended and cared for her plants, life was hard.

But she lived out the end of her days, mulching

and tumping and banking the soil, turning it,

in the garden of her grandchildren.

8/24 Write On! With Susie Terence