Everything I Need to Know About Waiting I Learned in the Garden

 

Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect for Roundup.

This week I've been thinking about waiting. Waiting for news. Waiting for the right time. Waiting for an important event. 

Life is full of waiting, isn't it? 

I remember reading something about how women are the ones who wait, and I wanted to rail against it. I don't want to wait, I want to DO!

But sometimes waiting IS doing. Like in the garden. And so, for this week's ArtSpeak: WOMEN I wrote this wee poem about gardens and life and waiting.

A couple of process notes:

I am kind of in love with Gabriele Münter right now. 

I had at least half a dozen false starts to this poem. I abandoned most of them because they were too long for this particular series....all my ArtSpeak! poems must fit and be legible on the graphic cards I create over at Canva.

(Apparently I have a lot to say about gardening...I'm tucking this revelation away to revisit another day...maybe there's a larger project I can create??)

When I realized I was going long, I decided to restrain myself with a short poetry form. 

First I tried a rispetto, but it just didn't stick. 

Next I tried a trinet, and came VERY close, but was one word too long...and I decided the word was essential enough to dump the trinet form and just go free verse. 

I like the bit of humor that emerged! 

Where I landed for today's offering is quite far away from where I started, with two lines from my journal that  I thought would be the heart of the poem:

What you call madness! chaos! obsession!

I call a devotion to beauty.

So I will save those lines for another (longer) poem. Thanks so much for reading.

Everything I Need to Know about Waiting I Learned in the Garden

Wait for
better weather.

Wait for seeds to sprout,
vines to twine
buds to blossom.

Wait, it died?!

Sigh.
Try again next year.

—Irene Latham

p.s. Another "waiting" poem: Girl, Waiting