Tag Archives: spring

Sprouting potato

Green-tinged, somewhat shrivelled. Fragile, finger-like, waxy shoots emanating. This spud has spent too long waiting to be boiled, and is making a bid for freedom.

Resurrection.

Mum fishes it out of the fridge and sets it aside for planting. It’s the one that got away.

I dig great ridges of metallic-smelling, crumbly brown earth – pulling out couch grass and bishop-weed, shaking soil off the roots and flinging them in the cracked yellow pail. It’s a big task, and yet I’m happy. Inquisitive neighbours look down from the pavement passing above, and cars snore by. The potatoes are gently laid to rest at 18 inch intervals, and earthed up. No watering – it would simply make them rot.

As weeks pass, dark green leaves peek through, brushing the earth from their faces and smiling at the fickle sun. They stretch themselves higher. And yet, some gardening wisdom – handed down, but poorly understood – says I must once more “earth them up”. I bury them again up to their necks.

Brighid

Soon it will be her day, this unfamiliar Goddess I only know from fleeting glimpses. Red ribbons set out on the boughs at dusk, retrieved with blessing against drowning after morning’s dew. Candles of pale blue lit at times of crisis and illness throughout the turning year.

They say she’s Goddess of smithcraft. Does she wield a ringing hammer in some smokey, charcoal-fired building? Does the water hiss as illumined red snarls into blackness? Does she coax great curves of copper into voluptuous vessels?

I wrote a poem once for her day, about loss and disintegration, followed by resolution, resurrection. Perhaps these snowdrop days have that sense, of slight shy signs of persistence and hope among the harsh snows and leafless trees. Do they have a scent? I think they might, and yet I barely wake up enough from churlishness of the dark half to bother to breathe it in.

Equinox

As the hot water runs prematurely cold
Do I step into
A bath half empty or half full?
Do the spotless clothes and sparkling plates
Embrace and serve me,
Or mock and hinder, having
Squandered all warmth in unattended day?

I am facing both ways –
A shoot shivering into hapless Spring
Wondering:
Will this release from waiting
Wind up into tendrils of gold,
Or fall back, burnt by a cold snap?

Do they dread the Spring?
Or is it a joyful surge again into outward being –
Not fearful of remembered, wrestling lives
Of cold, drought and strangulation?

Ambiguously somehow,
Hope and retraction disquietly hang
On this balance day.