Dark soil is waiting, soft and moist. I press seeds, keepers of sleeping life, home to earth, and each awakens to its inborn song. Tiny cotyledons tightly folded in their casings, swell, burst, thrust a shoot into air, spread open two green leaves.
Tending seedlings, I think mouse embryos curled in a warm womb, turtle eggs hatching under southern sands. Spring breezes riffle my sun splashed woods, set hepaticas’ small pink stars twinkling across leaf littered forest floors.
In Old Chinese, a picture of a hand touching a seedling is in the word for poetry — words spoken at the altar of fertility — inexhaustible effervescence. Stillness that has no name.
About this Poem
Nathalie Sorensen read from her verse at KFPL’s 2018 Poetry Month Reading on April 24.
