Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
The Lettuce
Again this summer
I’ve forgotten to harvest
the lettuce that we planted
when the ground was barely workable,
warm enough to support the tenderness
of seedlings, brown, pale, and white, barely
opening to the world, the air, the sun.
We are still human, he tells me, even though I think
that we may be losing whatever it is that makes humans human?
Humanity seems a fickle word now that pundits use it
to talk about the unfurling of threats, bombs, lies. The lettuce,
when you forget to harvest, shoots up
like it’s trying to reach the sky, but it rots
from the outside and in towards the core,
slowly taking over the joy of green, crisp leaves.
We are like this. Everything greens and grows and rots
when we aren’t looking. Democracies,
romaine, bibb, souls, humanities.
How can I forget to harvest the lettuce?
Why do we plant it at all?Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection