The Gardener Finds Out Death by Adam G

In Spring the gardener finds out death–
What fruit tree limbs did not overwinter.
Some stems twig and bud and bloom,
Some stems splinter.

I lost a limb some seasons back
From my own flesh–my firstborn daughter.
Time healed the break, but I still lack
The apples of her laughter.

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Adam lives with his wife and children in central New Mexico near the ranch his great-grandfather lost in the Great Depression. He is a member of the www.jrganymede.com blog.His oldest daughter, Betsey Pearl, died of cancer in the spring of 2005.

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Fern Hill Revisited by Jonathon Penny

Time held me green and dying, though I sang,
And spun me off the whinnied fields and out of praise
In his big harvest hands €˜til horse and hen and place
Were only memory, then myth, then vacant space
Implacable as Time’s own clockwork face.
And my worn trap-spring sprang,

And I, Time’s time-mocked minion,
Found Death had no dominion after all,
And all was Eden, more than Eden €”
A Heaven pastoral, as earthy as that dell,
As chatty as those ricks, borne as the very farm
Grown green and golden about Fern Hill.