The Uncertainty of Yard Work

By Bob Carlton

My love now plants
plastic flowers beneath
the fruitless mulberry
in the front yard,

flowers that make
rain and frost
irrelevancies.

My love would buy
already blossoming plants
and grow upset
they faded so quickly.

My love would buy
already blossoming plants
and grow upset
they faded so quickly.

My love has never understood
that beauty is work,
not a bought commodity
to outlast the years;

that beauty is earned
each time
by small roots that search,
sometimes in vain,
for a chance to flower;

that beauty has seasons,
times of browning and greening,
growth and struggle;

and that sometimes beauty
is stillborn in the stern,
dead at root level,
and does not come back.

The sterile perfection that never fades
is not beauty,
can never match
the rich ground of random miracles
we sometimes so thoughtlessly tread.