[2 poems by Lucinda Trew]
if you wish to grow a garden, first seed
your soul with sadness
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for it helps to have an ache, a molecule
of sorrow that will swell, release and drench
the patch of earth you claim
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like a weather plane sowing stingy clouds
with silver beads of iodide, lush promise of rain
something withheld – a slip of rue, s spore
of woe to bury – a slender sprig of remembering
your shallow place in all of this
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a cloister of green where secrets are safe
where worm and peat, centipede and muddy
trowel will carry melancholy to the seedling
graves you dig
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for a garden is forgiving – a copse confessional
a place for penance – pulling weeds, snapping
roots, kneeling in dirt
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and tending, gently tending, to fragile shoot
breaching bud, those in need of holding up
and the healing grace of fresh tilled ground.
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♦
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when trees fall
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from natural cause – nor’easter, drought
decrepitude – they lean in, one upon another
++++ a prayer of knotty hands
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we pray, too, in other ways, holding one another
close in crook and crutch of branch, and nests
++++ for those in need of cradling
.
we unfist fingers, unwind clocks, hold one another
in a basketweave of leaf and twig and comforting
++++ like trees, we slant
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against wind and time, hearts and boughs that break
from storm and thorn and toppled crowns
++++ we ease one another
.
to ground, to the resting place of forest floor
to beds of moss and tender mercies yielding to ash
++++ as we all fall down
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Lucinda Trew
from What Falls to Ground, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte, NC; © 2025
++++
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♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
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I love these poems for their compassion in the deep sense of that word, “suffering together.” In reading these lines I am able to pause and slant against the wind of my own doubt and daily struggles. Lucinda writes, “a poem is a bone / in the graveyard of remembering.” In memory I visit the bones of loss and pain but also the roots and seeds of what may again grow into joy. In the music of Lucinda’s words and phrases, the myth and earthy origins her poems suggest, the impermanence of all things resting the midst of rising sun and growing plant – in these I rediscover hope. Yes, we all fall to ground. Yes, we may ease each other as we fall.
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♦
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Lucinda Trew lives and writes in the red clay piedmont of North Carolina, USA. What Falls to Ground is her debut collection and is available from Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts.
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Additional poetry by Lucinda Trew at VERSE and IMAGE:
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Saturday’s Submission – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems sent to me by readers. If you would like to consider having your poem appear, please see the GUIDELINES here:
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