Today I plucked husky, bud forms from what short weeks ago had been the blooming spike of a foxglove; it’s hot-pink velvet flower chambers irresistible to the low-thrumming bumble bees suckling their depths.
And I tipped numberless soft-brown grains into my palm, each one so tiny it could have been lost in the skin creases.
Haphazardly, one-handedly, I cleared the poor soil of neglected borders of root-map of ranunculus, new dead nettles, ground elder; each valuable, beautiful but domineering; and scattered hard-packed foxglove embryos into the dusty spaces.
Afterwards I stood outside the faded front door on the thinning square of blue-ish slate gravel, hot to the side of our tabby soaking the stored heat into her bones, and studied ragged pots. Daisy-shaped blooms I’d inexpertly planted, (how long ago? Last summer?) had surprised me with their vigour, pushing out brown and yellow tie-dyed eyes, good enough for any seventies upholstery.
Their ombred petals had dropped leaving fluffy spheres atop browning stalks. The earliest of these had grown the grey fluff of the elderly. I pulled it from their round heads and scattered the down-tailed plant blueprints in the same patches of cleared soil.
And again, God-like, I snapped off crinkled heads, gathered and sent out into the earth the packaged DNA of papery orange poppies and snowy-bloomed aquilegia with a sweeping arc of my hand.
~ Polly Oliver 2020
(Not so much poetry, maybe ‘poetic prose’? Thanks for reading, Polly)
