Garden
Chemo Summer
With pesticide lungs I breathe her in,
a heady sea of sweet peas, tea rose, geranium, jasmine.
Our fast dividing soils have found a way
to germinate;
she comes into being –
perennial, I pass away.
Two years ago I planted the wisp of a clematis,
dreamed she’d creep up the fir tree. This year,
she weaves a ladder of purple stars,
and the honeysuckles have finally kissed the air
with their sticky lips, and the raspberries blush,
the herbs zing, stems grow wings and bulbs push up
from everywhere. Only the rhubarb sulks
under leaves that shield my sun-shy baby skin.
Now I must operate with gloves,
work her cells without getting cuts.
Her plagues are greenfly, slugs,
a neighbour’s black and white cat,
the bindweed that suffocates all it clasps,
with its delicate white petals that ask to be kept,
but I rip at the roots because its nature, if left,
will grow and grow and grow.
Sometimes I think of this –
wonder what might be hibernating,
waiting for a spring where it might seed again.
Then I’m absorbed in all the green again,
making a bird’s nest
from my falling hair.
Vicky Morris is a Welsh poet, editor, mentor and creative educator based in Sheffield, UK. Read more.
First published in Butcher’s Dog Magazine (England, 2018)