It's the third Thursday of the month so I'd like to welcome you to A Gathering of Poetry.
We started cleaning up the garden so I've been thinking about the marvel of the compost pile. I was pleasantly surprised to find a poem about it, and I enjoyed how eloquently Andrew Hudgins wrote about "the opulence of everything that rots". I hope you can appreciate the beauty of your own compost heap.
by Andrew Hudgins
out of an unclean?
The beauty of the compost heap is not
the eye’s delight.
Eyes see too much.
They see
blood-colored worms
and bugs so white they seem
to feed off ghosts. Eyes
do not see the heat
that simmers in
the moist heart of decay–
in its unmaking,
making fire,
just hot
enough to burn
itself. In summer, the heap
burns like a stove. It can — almost — hurt you.
I’ve held my hand inside the fire and counted
one, two, three,
four,
I cannot hold it there.
Give it to me, the heat insists. It’s mine.
I yank it back and wipe it on my jeans
as if
I’d really heard the words.
And eyes
cannot appreciate
sweet vegetable rot,
how good it smells
as everything dissolves,
dispersing
back from thing
into idea.
From our own table we are feeding it
what we don’t eat. Orange rind and apple core,
corn husks,
and odds and ends the children smear
across their plates — we feed them all into the slow,
damp furnace of decay. Leaves curl at edges,
buckle,
collapsing down into their centers,
as everything turns loose its living shape
and blackens, gives up
what it once was
to become dirt. The table scraps
and leafage join,
indistinguishable,
the way that death insists it’s all the same,
while life
must do a million things at once.
The compost heap is both — life, death — a slow
simmer,
a leisurely collapsing of
the thing
into its possibilities —
both bean and hollyhock, potato, zinnia, squash:
the opulence
of everything that rots.
====
Hudgins, Andrew. "Compost: An Ode". Poetry Magazine, October 1985.
You can read more about the poet here.
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Thank you for reading and joining us for our monthly Gathering of Poetry. You are more than welcome to add your link below if you would like to share one of your favorite poems. The more the merrier!
"The opulence of everything that rots." Oh, that is brilliant! I love the way poets can turn the ordinary old chore-level things of life into evocative words of loveliness and import. Compost. Who could've guessed? Thanks for sharing this poem, Bonny. I love it!
ReplyDeleteYes, what Kym said -- only a poet could make us see the beauty in decay!
ReplyDeleteThis is a stunning metphor for life, is it not? This poem so eloquently speaks to the nature of everything in our lives. There is great wisdom in accepting that everything we find beautiful and sustaining in our lives is transient, and that the cycle never ends in our lives or in the world. It is a bitter truth, and yet so much beauty comes from it.
ReplyDeleteWe had a lot of trees taken down a few years ago which made me very sad. The big piles of shredded wood that were left behind after grinding the stumps have all taken on a life of their own. I find myself digging in it when I need some extra dirt for potting and it makes me feel better seeing all the life underneath the decay.
ReplyDeleteIt's the Circle of Life! :-)
Deletewow. there's so much going on here, especially as we see the natural world around us prepare to winter. Some of those images are not very pretty, and yet they are all beautiful...when we see with our hearts instead of our eyes.
ReplyDeleteCompost is one of nature's wonders. This poet sees so much more. What a great poem Bonny.
ReplyDeletedelightful! Compost piles remind me of my dad who took great pride in his!
ReplyDeleteI think I might never look at a compost pile in the same way again. It's amazing how poetry can elevate ordinary things into the extraordinary.
ReplyDeleteAndrew has me thinking that the sacrifice that things make as they join the compost heap... sacred. The idea that I need to keep working at becoming something better... and that the process might be messy along the way! Thank you so much for sharing!
ReplyDelete