Harvest – a poem by Holly Day

Harvest
 
we found the tomatoes grew best in the cemetery
sending their thick roots deep
into the soil, wrapping thickly-furred cilia between
sinew and bone, found new life in places 
left for the dead.
 
we threw our seeds random between
the overgrown plots, hoping the tiny plants would escape
the eyes of the caretaker, the blades of his mower
the heavy footsteps of other people
visiting other graves.
 
late summer, when the vines rose high
climbed around the rough trunks 
of ancient willows of firs
we crept into the graveyard, baskets under our arms
collected enough ripe fruit to last through
the long, cold winter ahead. 
 

Holly Day (hollylday.blogspot.com) has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).

Leave a Comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s