by Dan Fleshler (Jackson Heights, NY)
I
The first person who ever planted anything
knew more than I knew about growing
and blossoming,
when, at 62, I started my first garden
on two swaths of dirt edged
with flimsy iron rails abutting
the chipped sidewalk
in front of my apartment building.
One year later, toe-tapping in mid-March
over patches of sleazy lingering snow,
I had no idea where I’d planted
all my hostas and coleus or whether
they would return and what spindly growth
to preserve or uproot and whether everything
I’d nudged into the earth had been ruined.
So I waited, and pruned away weeds
and leaves, and tried to pluck up
everything that had been tossed
from the sidewalk, including
shattered Tanqueray and beer bottles,
blunts and condoms, candy wrappers,
Dunkin Donuts cups and even grimy dentures.
II
I had glimpses of ancient farming forebears,
imagined them talking about the harvest
in anxious Aramaic.
A haphazard, often indolent Jew,
I didn’t mark my days
based on their pastoral calendar,
which relies on the harvest cycle
and movements of the moon
to divvy up the year.
But in morning meditation sittings,
before mindful breathing,
I’d begun to sprinkle in Hebrew prayers,
psalms and paeans that prompted wonder
at miracles, like the astonishing fact
that I was carbon-based matter aware
of itself, or the energy that exploded
in my cells when insulin meshed
with sugar.
The praise from radically amazed Jews
nudged me into trying to embrace,
despite hard cold evidence,
the Buddha’s claim that human birth
was precious and helped me confront
all my plagues, especially the recurring
conviction, pestilent and dark, that time
was ticking past
with no purpose or point.
When I Googled “Hebrew harvest prayers,”
I learned that on Pesach,
before the First Temple was embedded,
Jewish farmers brought sheaves of barley
to priests for blessings
and chanted an annual prayer for dew.
Then, craving abundant wheat, they started
counting the Omer, a chant announcing
each new day, along with the number
of weeks, for 49 days until the holiday
of Shavuot, their harvest festival,
as if keeping track of time, not forgetting
and loudly proclaiming the days ticking past,
could yield the right amount of rain.
III
Three mornings after Google’s revelations,
I spotted the woody rootstalks of my hostas.
After two days, their tiny green stems bristled
after a light rain and the earliest bits of coleus
pushed above the dirt. I knew enough
to buy mulch and violas at the Home Depot
and drop and shape them in the earth
next to my sidewalk.
By the time Pesach rolled around,
I prayed for dew but couldn’t shift
far enough away from myself
to count the Omer and anyway
I didn’t need the extra effort,
because there were already
new leaves and flowers.
A few more arguments for time
to continue are lingering
in my front garden,
as people skulking past hurl
KFC baskets, vape pipes, paper bags
and bottles into mystifying soil.
Dan Fleshler’s short stories and poems have been published in North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Buddhist Poetry Journal, Half and One, and Masque & Spectacle.
The Jewish Writing Project 