Article voiceover
Making encore appearances here from separate past posts, because, look: let’s spend some extra time with any fellow creature who shows us how to stay rooted. Tough. Drought-resistant. Evergreen. And memorably, indelibly, LOUDLY aromatic.
2022 On a late-winter afternoon, as fumes of strongmen’s threats attempt once more to block the distant sun, as a captured soldier weeps while his enemies give him tea and a telephone to call his mother, as a woman in a battered city leans from her kitchen window to fling a jar of pickles at a combat drone, on this late-winter afternoon, in another part of the same world, I am pruning the rosemary bush tough-rooted in a corner of the garden. With every snip of the shears its voice grows louder, the oratory of its fierce green smell claiming the sun-chill air, astringent, undeniable, alive; with every snip its needles bleed their loud voice onto my hands, send them stained and shouting fierce green truths into the world outside this late-winter garden.
ANOTHER POEM WITH ROSEMARY IN IT 2023
I have already written one poem with rosemary
rooted at its heart, the pungent metaphor
of that aroma lively in a garden (and on my skin)
a whole day after pruning.
And there is more to say:
about its tough and woody branches, the dull
and dusty green of its needles, the workaday blue flowers
that cling at intervals along the tenderest stems;
about its stoic growing habits, endless sun and sand-dry soil
no trouble, it digs in and thrives without complaint,
daunted by nothing really except the sides of a container,
its hardy roots inclined to sulk and wither when
they find themselves confined.
Above all (and it bears
repeating in more poems than one) the operatic volume
of that scent and, if you are so bold, that flavor --
as if some plain and weathered worker on an hourly wage
tipped back his head unbidden, poured out Puccini
in purest loudest tenor, making a theatre of garden,
kitchen, stockpot, roasting pan; for such a gruff
and sturdy earthbound grower, its taste is best enjoyed
ethereally, an aria borne on softened evening air
from open windows to the street below.
Bees enjoy
its flowers, and I would enjoy, once, tasting honey
from a rosemary-fed hive, I would enjoy forever
the sunlit humming garden where enough rosemary
blossomed, to keep that hive in honey.
"I would enjoy forever
the sunlit humming garden where enough rosemary
blossomed, to keep that hive in honey."
Fragrant...buzzing with pleasure!
I am very grateful for the boisterous and neglected rosemary that grows in several dilapidated front gardens on our street in London. That someone planted them at all shows that a long time ago a resident had some interest in the front garden of these multi-family houses. Now they are left entirely to themselves and jostle with recycling and trash bins and crumbling walls. I like to pick a few bits as I walk by and keep them in my pocket. Then I’ll be riding the train and put my hand to my nose and smell the rosemary. It’s like a secret happiness in my pocket.