gardens, especially ones where you can eat what you grow, are delightful idea-sparking kinds of places for poetry. below are the first matt's wild cherry heirloom tomatoes which i bought as a little plant in may, sourced from b & h organic produce in morgantown, berks county. at the farm, erica bowers-lavdanski kindly grows these and many other foods to sell in our region.
part of the perk to buy this plant involved the fact that one of my brothers is named matt, and i wanted to give him some of the first fruit of the season as a nice surprise in his overloaded workdays, like the lives of so many of us nowadays. a poem about these tomatoes and him is below.
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garden children from b & h organic produce by late june
by jennifer hetrick
parade of sweet little bites
in the garden, these wild cherry
tomatoes are named the same
as my brother but heirloom.
matt, not quite as heirloom,
left our mother's body in 1969.
i will take a bowl of them
to him when he's in between
loading the back-ends of trucks
with mulch, topsoil, or river
rock, and tucking the freshly
scored roots of rhododendron
or spirea into the soil of some
stranger's yard. slow down. eat
a tiny tomato. live. live truly.
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