Wiltshire

Priced to Sell

Saturday morning arrives early,
swelters before the first car appears.

Paper stickers smeared with regret say,
“Everything priced to sell today.”

Decades sorted, sifted, culled,
set out on tables for strangers

who bargain to take kitchen gadgets,
Olympic buttons off my hands.

Really, it’s going okay

until the smiling man walks away
with Dad’s new shirts from Christmas,

until a woman buys all the plastic bowls –
even the one Mother always used for potato salad.

A sudden rain brings no relief.

Summer Harvest

On the day a brown doe hurdles the ten-foot
fence, stands trapped and quivering inside

my garden, I open the gate to ease her escape
back into the forest. The damage from her brief

incursion: asparagus reduced to nubs, trampled
artichokes that I’d been warned would not grow.

Mine is the intrusion; this land belongs to deer
and raccoons, carpenter ants and field mice.

But planning, clearing and planting consumed
spring; now this tilled, sown, hewn bounty

belongs to me, owns my blood. The dirt, fresh
and alive in my hands, the breath the earth

whispers gently into husks, the loosing power
of sun and moon to pull potential from hard seed:

this trinity grows me, greens me daily, ripens
me to summer harvest in this forest garden.

© Wiltshire