CHARLENE LANGFUR

A Certain Way of Understanding Human Life

Of course this has to be about protection and the education

of all of us as gardeners, lots of talk of how a flower opens up in

the middle of the night, how the bees collect pollen in the morning

to keep up the food supply, how life continues with us in it, how food

comes to our tables, how ants teach patience and how we all need

patience and  the skill to live in the moment, how flower petals open

and open again, how to remember if the color of the rose is blush

or off white or yellow as the moon, how we are able to open up,

and to open up quickly, after the worst, recover with care for

others and ourselves. Nothing technocratic or second removed,

nothing electronic in a world made up mostly of dirt and water,

hydrogen and rock. How we thrive on the place where we live

if we take the time to walk on it or sit on it or like Native Americans

taste earth so we do not forget. And how we fall in love with each

other under a full moon or a half moon on a summer night in the

early years of life, how seniors love each other and laugh until

they can’t breath at old jokes and new jokes and dumb jokes, the simple

and the true. How light shines all over the place and some of us, artists

and otherwise, try to catch it and sit in regard for it. Daylight on earth.

The sweet pea blossoms white and delicate breaking wild. The yellow

sunflowers touching sky.

Charlene Langfur is an organic gardener, a southern Californian, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow, and her most recent work includes a series of poems in both Poetry East and Weber — The Contemporary West.