"The Audacious Garden"
With fresh, FREE prompt & poem by Dorinda Wegener
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*This week’s guest writer is Dorinda Wegener. Her book FOUR FIELDS is forthcoming from Trio House Press in 2024.
Ah, spring. The time of year when garden-tenders and dirt-diggers can be seen on any given day, wandering their yards, on their knees planting & pulling, burying & unburying. Then watering. Waiting.
These folks have always been a curiosity to me. As someone who has raised three children over a period of nearly 20 years and yet cannot seem to keep a potted plant alive for a single season, I am in awe of gardeners & farmers, of course. But I am also suspicious! Let me explain.
What are they trying to prove, I wonder. How audacious, to insist that a seed transform & emerge. What fortitude & determination compels them to spend their hours toiling over dirt, in order to grow tomatoes which would be cheaper to purchase in a store?
The more obvious answer: it is all about the process. The satisfaction of growing something nourishing. The less obvious answer: in a world obsessed with money, celebrity, status & power, tending to soil in solitude is an act of resistance.
The following poem & prompt ask us to see our histories, our current realities & our futures as gardens. And really, is there any other viable alternative?
Father Sings for Supper and Severance by Dorinda Wegener What survives? My sister’s ruth; a deed composition; his subject-verb disagreement, father’s dementia paling his eyes. The trust in our family farm, marginalized. We have less rhodora and ground blueberry than before. Bind and yoke the oxen, rib-thin —a second thought: everything is here. We have always had chickens and beef. Gut and liver, beloved throat with aged esophagus, Eat! Take up the tine, tune and sing, to cattle, to cattle! I will wrestle long the withered heath. —She will feed you: everything lese here. -First published in THRUSH lese: Archaic/obsolete verb meaning ‘to lose.’
Prompt: Pick a length of time: 3 days, 5 days, a week.
While scrolling through social media take screenshots of the other accounts (feeds/posts) or ads your phone has curated for your viewing. Capture flora, fauna, capitalism, anything that sparks an interest or an emotion, just concentrate on capturing screenshots at this stage.
After the allotted time, grab a notebook and research all aspects of the items in the screenshots. Pay special attention to witch's names on plants, folklore, biological differences (i.e. rounded leaves on a flower vs. spiked leaves), land regions, etc; if it's an ad, research how the product started, its history, etc. Don't be surprised if you end up with pages of notes.
Then write, weaving in the various factoids, braiding the images together, striving for a cohesive whole. This phase I call 'think and link.'
Then try to forget everything you just researched (i.e. you may have 10 facts on blue violets, but only 2 where braided into the whole)... and take the braided draft to the computer or a fresh sheet of paper depending on how you like to write. Refine, revise, add stuff in, let the creative writing come forward, and viola: a poem.
This poem (process and end artifact) can be as organic and natural as you wish or as modern (i.e. Poem Found on FB, Poem Begot from IG, etc).
BONUS: save all your gathered, unused facts and lore in a binder to be used as fodder for the next creative fire.
Dorinda Wegener is a Perianesthesia Certified Registered Nurse in Richmond, VA, where she resides with her family. Wegener has had work published in many journals, including Indiana Review, THRUSH, Hunger Mountain Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Berkeley Poetry Review, as well as within Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets (Hobblebush Books) and Lingering in the Margins: A River City Poets Anthology (Chop Suey Books). FOUR FIELDS is her debut poetry collection & is forthcoming from Trio House Press in 2024.