In the Garden

A Poem

Gary Phillips

One returns home sleepy as a river god, to the garden
The day undone, lost your divining rod? to the garden

A pleasure to capture flowers for the kitchen table
and bend and worry up a clod inside the garden

Our Lady said she would return, in white and might,
To lay a balm upon the sod of all our gardens

I and my people are old; we have our hands inside the earth
And as for death and taxes, fire, and blood? We’ll tend this garden.