Go play in the dirt, she said,
and tonight, though I call it
harvesting potatoes,
what I’m really doing
is “playing in the dirt,”
the quickest way I know
to recalibrate the soul.
The potatoes are a bonus, really,
though I say they are why I am here.
Each firm, red-skinned round
I pull from the earth is a small proof
of how things can grow in the dark—
the way a woman, too,
can grow in conditions
when she forgets for a time
there is light.
I sift the cool soil through my fingers
as I pull my hands through the bed,
and I fall in love with this substance
made richer by what is dead,
this basis of all that lives,
this home for the kind of treasure
I honor now more than ever,
the kind that needs darkness and time.
Posts Tagged ‘potatoes’
Ode to Digging Potatoes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dirt, earth, gardening, grief, harvesting, potatoes, soil on September 27, 2024| 11 Comments »
Digging Potatoes, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged changing, garden, life, love, parenting, potatoes, son on October 3, 2021| 10 Comments »
Dear friends,
It has been seven weeks since I sent you a poem–seven weeks since my son chose to take his life. Thank you for all the ways you’ve supported me in this time–prayers, emails, letters, gifts. Though I have been unable to respond to all your kindness with personal notes, please accept my enormous gratitude. Thank you. Thank you for all the love and kindness I have felt surrounding and infusing me–I have never felt alone. I am so grateful for you.
I think I am ready to continue the daily sharing. We’ll see how it goes.
with love,
Rosemerry
Digging Potatoes, 2021
I am not the woman I was
a year ago when my son and I
harvested potatoes. Today
I must look like her—
bare hands in the dirt,
sunhat on. But she did not know
the deep loss of losing a son.
Perhaps she’d imagined it.
That is why she did everything
she could to keep such a loss
from happening. But the woman
I am today knows all too well
what I cannot control.
I plunge my fingers
into the cold earth
and talk to my son
as if he can hear me.
I miss you, I say. And I reminisce
about all the other years
we did this together. I ooh
at the size of the potatoes,
hold them up as if he can see.
What does love care of absence?
Love grows, despite death—
it roots in each cell and insists
on tendrilling, touching everything.
In the middle of the night,
a voice commanded me to remember:
Life needs us to live it.
All day I puzzle over the message.
All day I lean into the words.
I say them out loud as I pull out
potatoes, ask my son what he thinks
it might mean. No reply. He has become
one with life now in a way
I cannot yet understand.
And so I breathe into it, this chapter
of loss, this life needing me to live it.
All around me, inside me,
I notice how so much is changing, notice
in each moment, a new invitation.
Communion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gardening, poem, poetry, potatoes, self love on September 10, 2019| 3 Comments »
At midday, I dug beneath damp straw
and gently ran my fingers through dirt,
and, there, in the kingdom of earth worms,
found dozens of beautiful ruby-skinned potatoes,
each one of them precious in my hands.
God knows I have longed to be found this way—
pulled out from my darkness and cradled,
held up to the light with an oooh and an ahh
and a laugh of joy, though I’m slightly misshapen,
though I’m bumpy and imperfect.
There are days when I see through it so easily,
the longing to be loved, and I simply feel the love
that always exists, the love that grows in darkness,
that is utterly unconcerned with worthiness,
that feels no need for discovery.
There are moments when I can’t imagine
I ever thought I was lost, like today,
kneeling in the dirt, marveling at the beauty
of potatoes, mud-smudged and lumpy,
knowing myself as another who belongs to the earth.
Ruby Makes a Meal
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged abundance, food, poem, poetry, potatoes, Ruby McHarg, sharing on January 1, 2019| 3 Comments »
The cupboards, she discovers,
have little to offer, but she
finds in a corner some purple potatoes,
and, on slicing them thin, finds
white and purple patterns
swirled like stained glass.
She approves. Pours oil
in the skillet. Nods at the splatter
when the potatoes slide in.
A cauliflower in the back
of the fridge. Yes. She breaks
off florets and adds them.
Some tofu. She crumbles it,
scrambles it, lets the foods meld.
Then lemon. Then rosemary.
Then chile. Then wait. She stirs.
She tastes. There are times
when out of what seems to be nothing,
we find magnificence. Enough
to share. Enough to make us think
abundance is hiding everywhere.
A Poem Not Really About Gardening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged parenting, poem, poetry, potatoes on October 22, 2017| 2 Comments »
Just today, in the garden,
I found dozens of dark blue
McHugh Blue potatoes,
hard and small, their
delicious fists hiding
in the cool soil.
How wonderful the world is
if you just dig a little.
All those things you planted,
they show up, even though
everything around them
looks dead.
Don’t be in a hurry,
the woman said,
and I realized
I was wishing away
these difficult days.
Imagine how patient
the ground.
Planting the Cloud Acre Reds
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, healing, love, poem, poetry, potatoes on May 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
with thanks to Artful for the fabulous starts
Last year’s potatoes—
small red fists
with stubby white shoots—
they have something
to teach the heart about
unclenching,
about how to find something of value
in their own darkness
something that knows how to reach
toward the light,
something that when faced
with darkness again
will reach even farther
until they become
astonishingly prolific, alive.
The Inevitable Sorrow of Potatoes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged betrayal, friendship, poem, poetry, potatoes on November 22, 2016| 3 Comments »
Something in me rails against the word inevitable,
wants to root for underdogs and impossibilities.
But everything and everyone lets us down sometime,
and we meet the inevitability we would rather not know.
Last week, it was the potatoes. When we went
to harvest them, we found them abundant
in the sandy earth, but with their red skins pocked
with black scabs. That’s where the sorrow comes in.
Later I learn Black Scab is the common name
for the pathogen. There’s something almost comforting
in calling things as they are. I learn
that when peeling the potatoes, if I peel deep enough,
eventually the dark spots disappear.
And the potatoes taste delicious, somehow
more potato than the potatoes in the store.
The sorrow was just a surface thing, not like
the letter I received today outlining the betrayals
of a friend. How I longed for it to be a surface thing then—
something I could peel and find the core still good,
still full of nourishment, still unmarred.
How impossible it felt to call things as they are.
I longed for the potatoes to be like auguries,
omens that everything would be okay,
I wanted them to be portents that when we dig
there is treasure to be found, though
it may not look anything like we thought.
Digging Potatoes with Finn
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, poem, poetry, potatoes, trust on September 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »
We wait until the plants are dead.
That’s the time to harvest. First,
we pull away the straw. The dirt
below is damp and rich. We rake
with our fingers lightly then,
so as not to scrape the skin of
potatoes near the top. And oh,
that first glimpse of gold, how
we laugh and remind ourselves,
Go slow. After all, we’ve been
waiting all summer. But sometimes,
in the company of delight,
it’s hard to wait a second longer.
I want to say something to my son
about trust, about the way
that marvelous things sometimes
need the dark in order to grow. But
it is the quiet, now, that I love.
The silence of four hands moving
the dirt. Finn pulls another potato
from the earth, holds it up for me to see.
We shake our heads in what, awe?
Dumb wonder at our luck? And plunge
our hands deeper, deeper into the darkness.