Poems by Heather Sellers
Archives: by Issue | by Author Name
On Flourishing in Winter
by Heather Sellers
Heather makes her home in wetlands near the Hillsborough River in the Lower Cypress Creek, Trout Creek, and Hillsborough watersheds which contain 344 lakes, 88 rivers, two named bays and many estuaries. Alligators walk and swim through the cypress stands and waterways here where bobcats, rabbits, wild pigs, snakes, and a stunning variety of insects, along with the only bird endemic to Florida, the scrub jay, make their homes.
I have never been able to throw away seeds or gods
or letters or things made by children
or even the frazzled, desiccated porch orchid down to a dusty
stalk with dried-out root-strands. She might live!
Today, late December, cleaning the laundry room,
I found an old envelope marked Bekana seeds.
I set the tiny seeds on moist soil in the old pots on the patio,
pots vacant for months, relieved to be far from the humiliation
of summer: petunias. I covered the tiny seeds
with their own dark cool territory and we were now
together in an insurgency, a saving.
And on the third day beaks of white pierced the black,
and a week later, on the cold solitary last day of the year,
I woke to find a festival of miniature green umbrellas on the dirt circles,
visibly humming. I pulled up a chair, listened to growth itself.
I watched the early leaves open, green leatherette book covers
inscribed by light. First true leaves come as wrinkled urgent spoons,
swing, flash and wave. This is our interdependency.
These are my oaths and salads. Given the right conditions,
transformation cannot be stopped. A garden is the opposite of a hospital.
My grip is on the green. It’s work. Every day, I drag the pots
across the patio, into the next hour’s lone spear of sun,
before the gleaming rectangle of light slides off into the dark.
And in this way I grow, too, every day, maybe stronger.
© Heather Sellers