It's Still Life

I.
The Gardener (A Palinode: a retraction to the piece below)

The gardener’s day
pours back and forth.
They’re dead, he says.

The azaleas survived one summer.
Died mid-winter when everything
looks dead.  He walks the garden,
complains about living on a hill
of chalk, the wind sweeping away
the bits and pieces of his sentence.

I’ll make the gardener a cup tea,
and two digestives for dunking.

II.
The Gardener (A Narrative Voice)

The gardener watches a soft
muzzle of clouds lying in wait.

                                          Rain.

He’s not much for poetry, but
he is a poet. Each plant contains
a gardeners’ syllable, perennial
pages and stanza borders,  and

yes, I acknowledge ample weeds
sprouting thin as legs everywhere.
Weeding is my forte, I’m told, but

he’s undeterred by written water
spilling from a tap, a robin’s nibbed
appetite for overturned worms.

The bird pounces. The gardener
returns a squinting smile. And I’ve
nearly forgotten that this blank
page of his will come solid colour.

He watches the clouds. For signs.
For fate. I watch a pot of simmering
soup, because watched pots

                                never boil.

Written for dVerse Poets: the first poem is a “Palinode” in response to the narrative voice exercise which follows it. The image is from the British National Library Archive. c 1350. Shared with @Experimentsinfc #APoemADay on Twitter   ©Misky 2021