-
-
- Cutting an Acre of Overgrown
Lawn
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- Cutting an acre of overgrown lawn
- With the push mower
- Keeps you in touch
- With land as other labor can’t
-
- No droning wasp nest engine
- To drown out the chides
- Of chattering wrens
- The irritable jay
- The cardinal’s clarinet from
high
- Atop the birch
- Celebrating my work
- (Glad that it is not his own)
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- No ghost clouds of exhaust pursuing
- As I circumvent ruts and domed ants
mounds
- Clover heads and dried dandelion
- Somersaulting through the air
- Like decapitated French royalty
- Wiry grass sterns snapping back
- Against the spinning blades
- Thistles and mullein trimmed back
- To sea level
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- Around the edges
- Tree trunks and lichen-dressed fence
posts
- Where the roller can’t reach to
gnaw
- I bend to tug out by hand
- Often exhuming metropolises of soil
- Along with the stems
- Worms, grubs, and tangled rhizome
- Wondering how many twigs I have moved
- To keep the blades from dulling too
young
- How many grasshoppers
- Had 5-legged life crises today
- How many garter snakes fled
- Back to the rough skin of Eden
- Where rabbits mow their own pace
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- In the end
- I drip as if a sudden spring shower
- Has soaked my shirt and pants
- In its pure baptismal waters
- These blisters swelling on my palms
- Like burning red apples
- Above the meandering lanes
- As I pause to rest
- Leaning like a grass stem
- Heavy with seed
- Just outside the old orchard.
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Bill Carroll*
teaches high school in Chicago spending much of his summers in Wisconsin watching insects,
and turning over rocks and logs. His mathmatical poem The Mighty Googol appeared in
the Illinios MathmaticsTeacher. Recent poems have appeared in Prairie Poetry
and Poetry Repair Shop.
- Beauty for Ashes Poetry Review ©1996-2001
- ©A Creative Ash Publication 2001
- Isaiah 61:1-3
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