Trimming I’ve pruned the lilac, privet, and the rose, the cedar and the maple and the oak. All will survive next winter thanks to those spring cuts. You’ve done such work too, I suppose. You heard the frozen limbs crack as they broke, and, since, have kept your orchard trimmed. The ice will have to find its victims elsewhere, freeze somebody else’s trees, who’ll pay the price for negligence. Neglect’s a nasty vice, on that rule each good husbandman agrees. Our family’s year of sickness, oranges froze, the garden went to seed, woodlot to smoke. A still hand sows disorder’s paradise. The knowing spend June weeding on their knees.
Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/
Amethyst Review 