The National Garden Scheme
I was a special event in a different context:
No poetry haggled out of words, or art
Coiled across the canvas and made shapes of.
If King Charlies were to visit I could not have tried harder;
The twenty-five who’d paid to examine my landscaping and topiary
Were each as important as he. My held breath during a period
Where not much was blooming, was released
At the last minute flowering of six-foot-tall lilies
That had unfurled their skirts of brightly coloured silks,
The pink and crimson froths of the astilbes,
The brilliant purple pourings of campanulas
From gaps, nooks, crannies, flowerpots and cracks in pavers,
Astrantia, dianthus, alstroemerias, lavender, linaria, Veronica
And the first agapanthus. From the visual silence of many greens
Sudden screams of colour blazed from the oddly made flowerbeds
And strangely shaped pathways that I’d carved from a one-time field
Into a map of the inside of my restless head.
“Oh, so beautiful,” they said, unable to imagine
All the jobs left undone that were so evident to me
And that I must finish before the second one.
