a children’s poem by Thomas Davis in honor of Ethel’s garden which is giving us the most wonderful sweet corn this year
Can you plant me a garden?
Will you fill it with hot snow topped radishes that have mouses’ tails? Purple fat eggplants? Long john carrots with dark eyes and a bushy top? Flush red tomatoes that look like they came from downtown? Golden eared corn? Tube potatoes with sprouts and white roots and a round belly? Thin lined green celery? Snake stringy spinach? Crying onions? Pod neighbor peas? Elephant fat watermelons? Puffed up white cauliflowers? Mushy pumpkins? Sunset red and black rhubarb? Embarrassed beets?
Will you plant me a garden?
More than corn growing in Ethel’s garden…
Embarrassingly good, Thomas. (And Ethel the skillful gardener, of course.) These vegetables seem more alive than all these limply being humans.
Very nice, Thomas–I like it!! I will forever look at beets in the produce aisle, now, and wonder why they are embarrassed!
I hear the voice of a child in this one. I love the way questions, after questions pour out of a child…and with the raised tone at the end. Very playful.
Cleverly written – I love this, Thomas! (And I can almost smell the veggies as they grow in the earth. Makes me crave vegetable stew….)
Wonderfully descriptive … and affecting all the senses!