09-07-2026, 12:58 AM
A Gardeners Fall
I spend the day kneeling on grass:
my bruised knuckles bent back,
the skin tanned by dirt.
Something feels nice about it.
Going hours with a single thought, spotting weeds
that don't belong
in the same bed as flowers.
On my hands, a web of scars
camouflaged in history
I wish I could celebrate.
Trauma feels like a stone to shovel.
Picking rocks
with my bare hands, I dig away
the soil, thinking it's not me
I'm sorry for.
Sometimes it's taking cuttings from a rose.
Planting flowers after digging up stones.
Laughing in yards, at work with old friends.
Trees knocking off your favorite hat.
The way it doesn't seem to mind
falling from such a height.
--
By way of suggestion. Still can't make sense of "sometimes it's takes" so I just did what I thought you meant there; sorry if I am missing the idea.
I think some more intentional lineation like this brings the poem off the page a bit, which is nice. Some of these lines deserve a bit of a highlight IMO. I get a really nice effect from "something feels nice about it" having blank space on either side. The humble declarative just floating in its own pool of contentment.
Eliminating the annoying poemy syntax and just telling it straight with the pronouns in S1 significantly improves that stanza IMO (for me, it rescues it).
Love what you've done with the trauma line.
I took massive liberties with the ending just to kind of show concept. You can do something cool with the ending instead of something boring, you can open the poem up instead of closing it off like it's an after-school special where you have to tell us the Moral Of The Story <3
Nice work.
--
ETA: feel really strongly about the changes to S1, don't know if you agree but I'll yap a bit anyway bc who doesn't love yapping? I think it shows how big a difference a little change in tone can make, and how much lineation can contribute to tone.
I mean personally, I see:
I spend the day
kneeling on grass.
Bruised knuckles bent back
skin tanned by dirt.
and get immediate distance between me and the speaker. I'm thrust into an obviously poemy world of language where poemy things are happening. I can choose to be down with that or not, but there's no room to even pretend I'm anywhere but in a room that knows it is a poem-room. Whereas:
I spend the day kneeling on grass:
my bruised knuckles bent back,
the skin tanned by dirt.
to me reads much more easily and naturally. I can choose to pretend the speaker is just being conversational, though of course there's clearly been more careful attention to language than all that. But there's no "0 chance anyone ever talks like this outside a poem" wall to scale anymore. And that puts me in a much more charitable mindset wrt the speaker and the immersive project of the poem.
I spend the day kneeling on grass:
my bruised knuckles bent back,
the skin tanned by dirt.
Something feels nice about it.
Going hours with a single thought, spotting weeds
that don't belong
in the same bed as flowers.
On my hands, a web of scars
camouflaged in history
I wish I could celebrate.
Trauma feels like a stone to shovel.
Picking rocks
with my bare hands, I dig away
the soil, thinking it's not me
I'm sorry for.
Sometimes it's taking cuttings from a rose.
Planting flowers after digging up stones.
Laughing in yards, at work with old friends.
Trees knocking off your favorite hat.
The way it doesn't seem to mind
falling from such a height.
--
By way of suggestion. Still can't make sense of "sometimes it's takes" so I just did what I thought you meant there; sorry if I am missing the idea.
I think some more intentional lineation like this brings the poem off the page a bit, which is nice. Some of these lines deserve a bit of a highlight IMO. I get a really nice effect from "something feels nice about it" having blank space on either side. The humble declarative just floating in its own pool of contentment.
Eliminating the annoying poemy syntax and just telling it straight with the pronouns in S1 significantly improves that stanza IMO (for me, it rescues it).
Love what you've done with the trauma line.
I took massive liberties with the ending just to kind of show concept. You can do something cool with the ending instead of something boring, you can open the poem up instead of closing it off like it's an after-school special where you have to tell us the Moral Of The Story <3
Nice work.
--
ETA: feel really strongly about the changes to S1, don't know if you agree but I'll yap a bit anyway bc who doesn't love yapping? I think it shows how big a difference a little change in tone can make, and how much lineation can contribute to tone.
I mean personally, I see:
I spend the day
kneeling on grass.
Bruised knuckles bent back
skin tanned by dirt.
and get immediate distance between me and the speaker. I'm thrust into an obviously poemy world of language where poemy things are happening. I can choose to be down with that or not, but there's no room to even pretend I'm anywhere but in a room that knows it is a poem-room. Whereas:
I spend the day kneeling on grass:
my bruised knuckles bent back,
the skin tanned by dirt.
to me reads much more easily and naturally. I can choose to pretend the speaker is just being conversational, though of course there's clearly been more careful attention to language than all that. But there's no "0 chance anyone ever talks like this outside a poem" wall to scale anymore. And that puts me in a much more charitable mindset wrt the speaker and the immersive project of the poem.