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Posts Tagged ‘mowing’

Can’t Get Rid of It

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 13, 2022| 4 Comments »


with a line from Albert Huffstickler, “The Cure”


The oregano escaped the garden
almost twenty years ago
and now it grows in such abundance
I mow it with the rest of the field grass—
oh wild scent of earth and mint,
a feral goodness, an untamable joy.
It always grows back, only more so.
It’s like the memories of you
that now grow so rampant
they help define the field.
I could never contain them
or eradicate them,
nor would I try—not even
the memories that hurt.
I am willing to meet what hurts—
it’s so like oregano. Pungent.
strong, astringent, too much
when encountered alone,
but when blended, it’s a bitterness
that enhances the world.
How strange that what hurts us
can nourish us.
How strange our lives are recast by grief—
a gradual transformation,
ordinary as the field,
natural as a leaf.

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Ode to Mowing the Lawn

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 28, 2022| 5 Comments »

Sometimes I mow from side to side,
sometimes from up to down
No one’s life depends on it.
The end product is not very different.
What matters is I notice I have a choice,
especially here where the stakes are low
so that when it matters more—
when in the balance are hearts and lives—
I remember there are many ways to “do it right.”
How do I do it, this act of loving you?
How do I do it, this forgiveness,
this surrender? And how will the path
I choose today change what is forever?
Oh this practice of pathmaking,
how sometimes it’s benign,
and sometimes it changes what’s here.
I push the mower through the grass this morning,
notice the record of how I’ve passed through.
I think of you. The scent of what if
hangs green and alive in the air.

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