Both of the poems about rosemary

For remembrance? Sure. Also for resistance.

Photo by Babette Landmesser on Unsplash

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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.

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                                                                                       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.

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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.

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