by Lynn Horsky, from the chapbook Refuge:

Seed Time

Midst the artful gardener’s meandering rows
just sown judiciously
circumventing pear trees,
patches of rich-leaved comfrey,
exotic berries, aromatic flowers for bees,
we tread wood-chip lanes
laid thick betwixt the beds.
When admonished to watch our step
I skip over a seed patch for the path
and stumble on the edge,
potential lives likely crushed instead.
All in the balance, one slip, then dead.
The seed is everything, she said.
Seed that encapsulates our inter-dependence to breathe
and feed, has its ancient stories, full of need for conditions
to be prime, beginning back in time, when the
unformed formed the great cellular divide.
The first case cracked, another arrived, requiring adaptation.
There’s diversity in numbers above all the mumblers
for stasis, there is no basis to cozy in a dark retreat,
though some may delay for years, germinating on a former life,
the mother’s part, gnawing at the microbial heart
of what is to come from its embryonic shell,
when through a pollen tube pours a fertile spume
and solar radiance uncoils its funicle.
An umbilical stalk, a stem ovule,
in blind peripatetic reach
finds the apex to breach,
then scuttles to the sun.
Now the seed’s reset on its cyclical mission to grow and leaf,
reproduce and spread its kin in colonies, to thrive in full capacities,
despite my boot, and the long cold spring weather.

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