A Gathering of Poetry: October 2024

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.

Compost: An Ode
by Andrew Hudgins

Who can bring a clean thing

out of an unclean?

— JOB 14-4

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.

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Hudgins, Andrew. "Compost: An Ode". Poetry Magazine, October 1985. 

You can read more about the poet here. 

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