Thomas McGuire: Garden Plots

Fuck her fucking flowers, Gicamdi cried as I tried
to make a point about the pastoral in Walcott and Césaire.
Daily people were dying in the streets & gutters.
Pastoral’s just one more way of taking cover
in the course of taking over.

Fostered in the rain shadow of Kilimanjaro
but ivy-league trained,
my prof railed like this for near an hour
against the wealthy white woman he’d heard
on Radio Kenya during a brutal year of revolution.

From somewhere in her compound, somewhere
behind iron-grated windows and bits of glass
grouted into the fortress walls around her house
that idiot lady rambled on and on complaining
to the talk show host about her troubles growing bougainvillea.

Every spring since then, Gicamdi’s echoed in my ear
and I’ve repressed my flower fetish.
Who needs to add more guilt
when there’s guilt enough to go around?
And I’ve come to half believe what Ho Chi Minh
said about his need for more poets
who could lead a charge, sharpen bayonets.

What with war, though, shattering Iraq
and scattering her children from Oaxes to the River Jordan,
what with sloughing glaciers raising sea level,
and me still grieving for my old man
who’s been planted in the earth
pushing daisies for two years now
I start to wonder what’s the harm
of a bit of color,
a little excess in the garden.

So this sheepish spring I’m raising flowers.
Years past, I justified my garden plots by rearing apples,
chives, tomatoes, cucumbers for pickling & canning.
I rarely saw much fruit for all my labor:
this sub-alpine elevation stunts all such growing.
Now I’m splurging, sowing a few perennials—
cornflowers, coreopsis, columbine—
but mounds of annuals, the kind of water-wasting
hopeless blooms that in these mountain parts
will fade in fall and not revive next spring:
cosmos, sweet peas with their sexy
scent and tendrils, and bleeding heart.

With every toss of seed I start to feel a hint of hope–
just a momentary flash; isn’t that the only honest hope
when folks keep falling in the streets, falling
by the thousands in Mosul, Jalalabad, Calcutta?
And when at last the flowers bloom,
that color splash is cruel—it comes so slow,
then quickly passes, for in high country parts
like these even when it’s spring,
winter waits and watches.

Black Forest, Colorado (elevation 8013 ft)
June 2006

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Poem copyright 2024 Thomas McGuire. From Dark Devouring by Thomas McGuire (Ragged Sky, 2024). Included in Vox Populi by permission of Ellen Foos, Editor-in-chief, Ragged Sky Press.

Thomas McGuire is a poet, translator, essayist, and literary critic. He was raised in Northern California (yellow-billed magpie country). Now he makes his home in Colorado (black-billed magpie range). Dark Devouring is his first collection.