06 Apr 2026: The Gardener

You hid the thorns better.

With your dirty garden shears
you
cut the pricks from the red-flowered things
until they were smooth and lovely braids.

You’re not here now as I clumsily
pick at the little pin-tip prongs
that stick out from these now leaf-bare plots.

I can’t do what you did.
You had the green thumb, the paring eye,
that could raise a dirt plot into a garden.

From my pruning I pitch and peer
into the barren blue above
and I ask myself if you could have just
let them grow.