In harvest bronze the morning sun
gilds the whorling dill:
the year is old but be it known
that there’s a new day still.
And newness goes with every seed
into a time unknown,
bearing fragile hope
from the present that we own.
Tag Archives: dill
July 13.19
Two dazzling things happened yesterday, dear reader!
As you know (or not), I’ve been in the throes of downsizing. I moved into this smaller house about a year and a half ago, and that makes this my second gardening season here. If you are a gardener, you know that you have to earn ownership of a garden; it doesn’t just happen. Nor does it “just happen” that a house becomes home. For me, it’s all a work in progress: this isn’t home yet either inside or out.
However, there were these two heart-stoppers yesterday:
I caught a glimpse of new color deep in a tomato plant. I was down on the ground as fast as my creaking knees would allow and, yes, there it was: the first red tomato! MY tomato! If you have read my blog in the past, you know that until recently my main claim to gardening fame was in consistent tomato-killing. I grew them in memory of my Grandpa Mauck but without much hope of eating actual tomatoes.
(Last year was The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, if you recall. The tomatoes had their revenge.)
And tuxedos in the dill! In my last house I had a magnificent dill patch and these very formal, elegant caterpillars feasted royally thereon. Swallowtails bobbed their thanks over what was left. This year the blasted rabbits ate to the ground every single dill plant I tried to grow, so I planted dill in a pot on the deck. Now come the beautiful caterpillars. Can swallowtails be far behind?
I dance a rheumatic jig and think that maybe home will happen.
Disconnections: September 12.18
What light pierces
it fires,
warning the eye:
Look fast —
but a moment’s sun
blazes
through this glowing cup,
this petal’d Chartres.
Connections: August 26.17
Dill feathers
butterfly tickles
dill seeds
crock of pickles
dill bones
pinwheel spindled
tale of life
ripening, dwindled.
Connections: August 20.17
The dill inspectors
all hardhat
ignored me when
I stopped to chat.
Summer’s old!
No time to loll!
Soon the clock strikes
half-past fall!
Connections: August 13.17
My family’s in the garden
the past grows ever green
my mom is in the phlox
most surely, though unseen
her dad in the tomatoes
my green-thumbed Grandpa Mauck
son of North Carolina
whose hills rolled in his talk
Grandma O’Hern in moss roses
her summer’s tried-and-true
her son, my dad, in marigold
(the only flower he knew!)
the dill for an unknown
its air a bit of mystery
but I know it figures somewhere
in my leafy family history
I don’t come (as they say) from money
I come more from dirt
so it’s good to feel them back
in horticultural concert.
Connections: July 14.17
It’s an earthen air
sagging over the dawn
musty
sweating on the lawn
popping with toadstools
and yesterday’s rain sits still
gathering the scent of soil
and a nameless farmer’s till
ghosts of crops past
rain-wafted now
old farms unburied
by summer storm plow
smells of wet summer
airy thick soup
fragrant toothsome
morning droop.
Connections: July 9.17
Holding tight in Hoosier clay
at end of thundering roiling day
the plants in tilted chorus say
the summer storm went that-a-way.
Connections: July 3.17
If there’s an inchConnections: May 23.17
Exploding from the depths
of garden’s winter chasms
the merry dill waves brightly
its mad enthusiasms.
Oddments 