Reopening the Garden

A walled-off acre
filled with corridors of flowers
and herbs and healing plants
seemed that it had come from
paper packages of seeds
a Shaker Eldress made.
Vines and curling tendrils
rose up straight so like
a straight-back chair
ascends, a final ladder
angels climb to heaven
amidst the foliage of a city
hiding holy beings.
Disheveled weeds in
pandemonium have spread
across embankments and
beyond my sight with
speckled butterflies and birds.
A simulacrum of our place
of first beginnings, now with
insistent fists of fuchsia of
vivid shades of violet.
The garden is a vestibule
to a house of plenty,
where on an antique table
a still-life lingers for a day.
And spiders in their own
mythic anonymity have spun
a gauze that covers everything
from a long abandoned wedding,
a raiment only worn by ghosts.
And in recesses of my broken head
deeper darkness hints at dawn,
as it catches light and then ignites the
vision of a widened world that weds
both gift and grace that will return
me to the garden I will then get lost in.

--
​Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who taught courses on Early, Medieval, Reformation and Modern Christianity. He lives in a small village in the heartland of Ohio, surrounded by
a nature conservancy and Amish farms.