In My Last Green Garden

By Sheila Beth deShields

PROMPT—Peace ...

Say his cancer returns.

Say a pandemic destroys the health of family and friends.

Say you are left alone and climate changes have intensified.

Say your fingers curl in arthritis and you cannot hold a pen.

Say you self-medicate before you dig a hole.

Say you live in the hole but remember to drink lots of water.

Say your raggedy short fingernails claw dirt as you try to climb out.

Say you forget to eat.

Say the volatile sun explodes its heat like Western fires.

Say your pinky finger is nibbled by a locust yet to rise.

.

Say you see yourself as

a black feather on an osprey’s wing

a sand particle lodged in a cream-shaded nautilus

a drop in a seaman’s last cup

a flea with an itch

a gadwall gosling white-butt-up in the weeds

the sound heard by four ravens ready to fledge

Say your cobalt hammock is shared with red finches filching cotton threads for their nests; you leave your hole; with your fingers inky blue from olallieberries, you fill your basket; you make cobbler with an imperfect crust woven to welcome summer; you smell the white gardenia blossom on the plant you chose, in memory of your mother; you dig to plant Pink Lady apple trees and your long muscles ache. Say you observe the evergreen ash pushing out dark emerald leaves in its canopy, and this tender promise cracks open your scorched-earth heart.

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Sheila deShields balances managing her ranch in Oklahoma and trustee work in the Bay Area. She was interviewed on NPR for her essay in At Grandmother’s Table. Publications include Comstock Review, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow, and an article on Woody Guthrie for The Halifax Herald. She is a founding member of Hedgebrook Sisters Writing Group, a recipient of Hedgebrook and Rotary International Fellowships, and a Deep River Poet.