What Hope Lies In This Earthly Garden

This patch of dirt, this womb of earth, organic black and aromatic with compost and coffee grounds, receives my spade, but soon my hands are digging there, putting roots in place as seedlings, kelly green and delicate as sparrow wings, fill the garden bed. Relentless sun draws sweat like rivulets on walls in a leaky house, salting my eyes and a skyward supplication: Dear God dismiss both drought and deluge; create instead a harvest bursting like the heirloom, deep red and overdue for picking. On the morrow, with work behind me for a day, I drive to town and join my neighbors in communal song: we praise the One who watches over home and field and commands his son to rise along with daily bread. Heading home through glacial ghosts, on asphalt softened by an early summer, and though the wide horizon invites redemption, I’ll not realize what I’ve done: prayer engaging as an echo (the cry of hope in cloistered air...) prostration pleasing to Apollo - and all the patriarchal gods - praises poured upon an ancient father, Abba, unable to embrace a child or climate refugee. I’ll not remember my mother, how she shaped bone and sinew from the black dust of burned out stars, breathing, from florae exhalations, oxygen into lungs, benefiting when I grow wise enough to consider the lily, to celebrate her gift, now trampled beneath the gilded idol, how she suckled me with milk as rich as the soil in her veins.