“A Winter Poem Outside My Window”

 

Don’t know who is hosting dversepoets.com tonight, (it’s Bjorn!) but it’s Open Link Night where you can post ONE poem of your choosing.  It’s my favorite time of the month.

(Watercolor, Untitled, Jane Kohut-Bartels, 2008)

 

The soil has lost its excellence.
The worms have gone deep into
The sullen earth and hide
I imagine curled up,
Embracing worm castings
And each other,
Desiccated former selves
Pale little ghosts
Awaiting the fertility of spring
The watering of a constant rain.

I squandered the bloom months,
Thinking paper and pen
Would bring its own blossoming
Scarcely noticing the vitality outside
My window,
Allowing cabbage moths and beetles
To dominate what I believed to be
My nod to farming,
To self-sufficiency,
My tithe to the earth.

Ah, the soil is hardened
By the sins of the season.
Sharp winds make
Their own furrows
The cold buries down,
Deep down
Torments any life
That would show its feckless head.
Especially those hopeful worms
Now bundled in worm-sleep.

The words, verse,
I chose to cultivate
Over cabbage, collards
Failed to bloom.
Better I had plied the hoe
And bucket to that
Than a fevered pen
To paper.

It is now winter
And the fallow earth
Plays a waiting game
Knows I have failed
In paper and soil
And mocks me with a barrenness
I feel inside and out.

Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2016

(This poem first published in “Pitcher of Moon”, Amazon.com 2014)