five red tulips in a white pot II

Five white hearts
wrapped in brittle brown paper,
stir in the dark,
reach out.

Standing in a flurry of snow,
a scatter of hail,
I am torn between eagerness
to see green shoots,
and trepidation at their daring.

 

Five red tulips in a white pot I

daffodil tete a tete

The first of my tete a tete daffodils has just opened! Spring must be very close indeed, even though there was a brief flurry of snow in Canberra on the weekend.  So here is a celebratory ha’ sonnet. 

 

 

A tete a tete
with daffodils,
“Well met! Well met!”
their greeting fills
me with delight,
and hope, despite
so grey a day.

 

 

gardener’s despair

This morning’s dVerse prompt from Claudia is garden(ing)!

I love gardening, but it’s a constant struggle here with the hungry wildlife and my own insatiable pig. Most recently the edge of the mouse plague has been the problem. 

Fucking kangaroos
and bastard possums!
They’ve bent my trees and
eaten the blossoms!

And the cockatoos!
That hooligan mob,
chew off the branches
to finish the job.

spring’s golden standard

It’s hard to avoid seeing evidence of climate change, when the spring bulbs are starting to flower around the winter solstice. The jonquils started a few weeks ago, in very early winter, and the first iris opened just a few days ago.

We’re not yet into the coldest part of winter, yet the spring is already pushing its way in. I am trying to enjoy it, without fearing too much the summer that will come after.

In winter’s stronghold
spring’s advance party unfurls
its golden standard.

wisteria pods

With a mouse-trap snap
a wisteria pod splits
spraying bullet seed

 

I was pottering in the garden today and mulching around some wisteria that I grew from collected seed last year. It reminded me of this haiku I wrote last winter.  I had left the wisteria pods on a window sill in a plastic bag, and then forgotten about them. A few weeks later I was startled by sudden bangs and snaps, and found the splitting pods had shredded the bag and sent the seeds across the room!  

five red tulips in a white pot

Today I am planting tulips.
I am planting five red tulips in a white pot.

casting nasturtiums

We finally got a decent frost and it’s killed off a bathtub full of nasturtiums. So I pulled them all out this afternoon and threw them to the chooks, who were very happy to have them.

Cookies and Cream, sweet as a dream
but rarely ever an egg between.
Ninja’s a handsome Australorp hen,
she used to lay well, but that was then…
The same is true for the five misses Brown,

how many hyacinths is enough?

I have sown many mice in the past week, and to celebrate I have ordered 50 hyacinths. I have tried to cut back, but the end of season catalogues are irresistible. I don’t even know where I’m going to put them all. I’ll just have to buy some pots. 

 

There is a line somewhere between
optimism and idiocy.
But herein lies the difficulty-
once it’s passed it can’t be seen.

So on I go, keeping my eyes on
another boundary now instead,
I’m charging on, full steam ahead
racing towards the sanity horizon.

But still, yet still, my resolve is hard,
Can you hear that keyboard tapping sound?
I’m buying more things to put in the ground!
Please, someone take away my credit card…

pretty mice all in a row

I dug the ground, I planted seed,
in the night, mice came to feed.
I bought more seed, planted again,
and in the night, yet more mice came.
Now I’m out of seed, and I’m out of nice,
I’ve laid the traps, and I’m planting mice.
and once I’ve planted a nice long row,
above the mice my seeds will grow.

and in ha’sonnet form for Stephen, here is the next episode:

I planted seed
all in a row.
The mice did feed,
no seed did grow.
Now planting mice
in rows all nice,
to feed the seed.

 

There is currently a mouse plague in western NSW. It’s not as bad here, but there are a lot more than usual. 

less than half the story

I’ve been thinking about seeds a lot as I keep planting peas that get eaten by mice, and I’ve written a few poems about them. But pruning one into 44 words for Monday’s dVerse quadrille prompt “planting seeds” didn’t work for me. So I tried to think of what a seed is – enough genetic information for an organism (diploid), the machinery of a cell to start it all going (mitochondria, etc)… Did you know that mitochondrial DNA comes purely down the female line? Yours is the same as your mother’s, your grandmother’s, your great-grandmother’s, stretching back along a line of a hundred thousand women…

 

What arrogance,
what masculine conceit,
calling your semen ‘seed’!
Spill it on the ground,
wait for an army of sons to rise,
from those sad wrigglers –
haploid,
halfwit,
not even half the story.
Wait forever –
it’s not seed you sprayed,
just pollen.