Small Potatoes \ Dusk, New Moon

Alan: Each year’s garden starts in hope, ends in melancholy.  There’s always something that flourishes, but it’s hard not to mourn the failures.

Small Potatoes

Some years there are only

small potatoes.

Something about the seed,

too much rain early

or too little late.

Each April's planting

goes underground

with a little more effort

and ache.  Still, we weed

our few rows: Carolas,

Onaways, maybe Red Norlands,

and, in October, dig.

Small potatoes again

this year.  I stare

at the little piles

of white and yellow,

no reds at all, sort

out those big enough

to get a peeler on,

gather the others up,

as if collecting tiny hopes,

carry them to the compost,

give them to the mice and worms.

Nancy: Gray dusk steals the color, stills the cove, gathers around me, waiting in silence.

Dusk, New Moon

A woman carries water.

On the far shore of the bay

a raven calls once,

breaking the silence left by the thrush.

The hill slope fades;

the flowers go out, one by one,

meadowsweet,

the roses, goldenrod.

Gray the doorstep,

the meadow, gray

the spruce,

the bay.

A woman waits.

Her doorstep is a gray stone

in a gray sea,

where nothing moves, there are no ripples.

Then into the cove of night

swim the stars.