The movies would have us believe that childhood is a series of adorable and wacky Home Alone moments. That’s why it’s the movies. It’s fantasy. The reality is usually simpler, and less spectacularly Christmasy.
Looking back now, I never realised how much my mother’s garden figured in my childhood. Nor her years-long devotion to seeding and sowing and growing and composting, long before it became fashionable. She used whatever she had at hand – absolutely nothing went to waste. I spent so much time in that garden, never truly appreciating all her work.
My Mother’s Garden
Baba yagas of pruned hedges squat
by a scarecrow broom in her knotted knicker hat,
while wooden stakes roll up their stockings,
and tomatoes adjust their cupped bulging bras,
and all coo over the tranquillity of the pumpkin leaves,
with their orange foetuses, full as folklore.
©elsp 2024
More of my poetry here
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