Page 7 - take_heart

This week’s poem, by Thomas Moore of Brooksville, consists of just one sentence with a surprise ending. The poem relates a story of Moore’s grandmother, who taught him gardening and, as he puts it, “how to get through a tough time.”

Her Telling

By Thomas R. Moore

When she told me

after she’d uncoiled the line with the steel stakes at the ends to set straight rows of peas clad in her denim cover-alls and tall rubber boots at seventy, after she’d tossed garden stones onto the long windrow beyond the asparagus, after she’d showed me

the ants climbing the peony stalks to the hard buds and cupped hands beside the kitchen propane tanks, and even after years of stirring green tomato mincemeat on the yellow Glenwood and tugging carrots from the hot August soil and snapping off ears of corn and letting me pick clean the tree of seckel pears- the hard tangy red fruit- in October,

even forty years after that Christmas day ZKHQ VKH VPDVKHG WKH WKLUG ÀRRU GRRU the children listening below, WR ¿QG KHU KXVEDQG LQVLGH dead by his own hand, my grandmother was stunned by her own telling.

TA K E H E A RT

A Conversation in Poetry

Edited & Introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2010 Thomas R. Moore. Reprinted from The Bolt-Cutters, Fort Hemlock Press, 2010, by permission of Thomas R. Moore. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to David Turner, Special Assistant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at poetlaureate@mainewriters.org or 207-228-8263.