Laughing, heads together, in the garden shed

A poem about a friend of mine.

The garden-shed lass herself. Photo by author.

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A couple of weeks ago I commented on Substack Notes that I was busy with a poem that made me laugh each time I read the draft of it. This is that one.

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WITCH BROOM                                                                       2025


Every time I turn her head
to mine, I find her stiff
green shaggy bristles all atangle
with human hair -- this garden-shed lass
who never touched an inside floor;
what that’s about, she’s never said
and I don’t care to ask. They laugh
to see the two of us at work --
get a new one, for God’s sake,
they tell me, and I grin back
and shift my grip, and on we dance.
They do not know the reach and pull of her,
light and deft as a bird’s wing,
catchy as a spiderweb; it is not
of her they think when they stare
surprised around the clean-swept yard.
That happened fast, they say,
and never hear the two of us laughing,
heads together, in the garden shed.

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I wrote in a post last year about the courtyard surrounding my small city church, and the comfort and continuity and occasional magic I find there — showing up on Saturday afternoons to sweep the church steps and the courtyard itself, and do some dead-heading and clipping on the plants in the surrounding beds. I’ve had human partners in this light work over the last twenty-some years, and I’ve also been partnered the whole time by … herself. She’s not the only broom in our little shed; there are a couple that look much more respectable and efficient, and invariably, the first time someone sees me working with her, they make a joke and suggest I pick a different partner. The joke’s on them. Looks aside, age aside (and she’s looked pretty much the same for the last two decades), she’s the best at what she does … and the embodiment of my personal Rule Three: Be exactly as odd as you are.¹

As the poem title suggests, I suspect her of Wiccan or pagan leanings. It’s extraordinarily tolerant of her to make herself so serviceable in an Episcopalian courtyard. And extraordinarily generous of her to teach me so much about the pleasures of being odd, and being good at what you do.

1. Now you want to know how many rules I have and what the rest of them are, don’t you? That would be telling. Although, if you go through my archived posts and read enough of the poems, you can probably suss out at least one other.