Tag Archives: harvest

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.