Robert Frost was a bad farmer.

I don’t think he made a dime,
couldn’t master that which
others could grow and sell
time after time after time.

But every effort led him outside,
and once there, he could observe
what would become words;

Poetry danced in a way no one
had before seen, a truth so
hard and cold, soft and strong,
every letter springing like shaved
weeds, the song of wildflowers
killing wheat.

Robert Frost was a bad farmer;

me?  I’m kind of a failed gardener,
a shoddy planter of plants
and flowers probably not best
for my soil because I failed
to study.

Worse yet, I lack the talent some
have, the desire to make things
grow other than thoughts and
feelings through words on paper,
sometimes rhyming!

Me and Frost are bummers, but
I dream to make those lemons
yield lemonade, his nine year
dance in wind not a full-on
charade!

I try my best out there every day,
after a morning of writing, I
set out to chop around, plant
and dig, water and spray.

Sometimes things die, others live
with an occasional “strive,” but
then I come inside, write it all
down, God giving us all not a billion
talents, more like one or two,

making everything all right!

I play golf like a poet; I garden
like a total writer, and have learned
to accept it.

I am pretty bad, but water to
whine, I reverse the fog that
clutters my mind, the dance in
soil just a ruse that produces
an occasional flower, endless
higher power,

and inspiring winds that turn
poems from springing weeds,
slithering snails, the dodging
lizard, jumping into an apple
tree now killed.

I did not see through the success
of the tomato at last; but in
watching it strive, doing my best
to water it daily, I found
reasons to sit down, plant some
words—

a skill not fully mine but God’s
ship to blast.