An acre an hour
Thursday, December 28, 2000
She planted the garden before she grew too weak
to do it, in the back yard of a rented house:
a poet’s eyesore, midsummer okra
large enough to shade an itchy gardener.
By then friends tended it while she sa up
writing on the porch. I feel like Scarlett, she’d say,
in this sundress. At night she’d tell us
life was small and tight around her
like a shrunken sweater: All that matters now,
her notebook said, is the work –
the conversation with yourself.
When we scattered her ashes on the hills
we prayed that she could finally stretch
at ease. What we remembered
was how glad we were to spend
the end with dirty hands,
cropping okra the old way,
while yellow backhoes
deconstructed farms and fields
and acre an hour.
Randall Couch
The author a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellow in poetry for 2000, serves on the planning committee of Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. He is in his second semester at the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers.
This is the third in a year-end series of commissioned poems based on newspaper headlines.