How Luminous the World Is
This is how I live with my winter garden,
a small world of assorted pots, red clay and
old hand-painted blue ceramic pots, dazzling
in themselves, pots, full ones and empty ones,
ready and washed from last year’s plants,
what stays with me as the pandemic goes on and on.
What’s always light is here, blooming even in the dark
because it is what plants do, flourish in their time,
near unstoppable if allowed to become more, grow
on their own, sunflowers inching taller by the day,
leaves spreading upward, stems thickening, becoming
stronger each day as they live easily with flux.
Always I am watching for what emerges,
wild yellow-orange flowers on the pied nasturtium leaves
in a giant black plastic pot, elegant and delicate,
the lavender growing next to it, emphatic, utterly what it is
and the yellow calendula, petals that will heal
all of us if we place the petals on our skin for health.
The light takes over me here in the garden, becomes
a world where anyone can flourish, watching the way
petals open, and for any of us who are alone in the quiet,
how simply what opens takes us with it, the tiny blue flowers
on the heather come back again when least expected.
Charlene Langfur is a green, LGBTQ writer, an organic gardener, a rescued dog advocate, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow in 1972 with hundreds of published poems and essays. Read more.