Fertilizer: A Sonnet
She plows the furrows, pushes past her wants.
Can she imagine rows and columns, summed
on spreadsheets as the basis for her work?
Or, does she dig down to her ballet class,
dance to Tchaikovsky all in lacy-white tulle
stitched with plastic violets for the waltz?
She isn’t graceful, but she moves with joy,
forgets herself, and driven to succeed,
puts gashes in the ground, and the manure
comes with the strain of overtime, and yet,
beneath the stony ground, each seed still sheds
its coat. The rootlets reach for sustenance.
The weak shoots seek the sun, and bidden or
unbidden, here, new blades of palest green
About This Poem:
- This poem first appeared in Issue #17 (September 2015) of Shot Glass Journal.
- It belongs with other poems I began in Cindy King’s class at Stockton.
- And it belongs in the group of poems I write to protest or to escape the rigors of the physician life. Most of these poems (except for maybe “White Coat Lies”) end on a more positive note than where they begin. I attribute that to the healing capacity that poetry has for me, but also to my tendency to be optimistic, sometimes to my detriment. (There will be much more about this in my memoir.)
- When I write in form, I don’t always indicate it in the title, but I loved the contrast between fertilizer and sonnet. For me, fitting a poem into a structure allows surprises to come up. I struggled to finish this poem. Then, in the liminal time of waking from sleep, the ballet class memories came. The idea made me laugh, and I used it.
