Sitting in one of my sitting-and-thinking spots in the garden, sometimes something catches my eye which brings me joy. In my last post, One hundred and ten years, I talked about the primroses in the garden, and why it mattered to me that they spread. We could have lost them with the blitz of herbicides in the previous century, and their modest presence is still not guaranteed.

Here is a poem then, that draws on their growing brightness in my spring days. Now, we’ve had some warmth, and they are beginning to retreat under the cover of later plants, but here is how I love to see them. Soon, their fine seed will begin to fall again, down over the sleeper into the waiting lawn. I thought about that experience of falling, and how so many things that feel like an end may not be such an ending, after all.

We’ll mow around them, and let them make their way across, amongst the speedwell and the forget me nots that are also growing there.

Enough

Some days, something
as simple as the way
the primroses tumble
over the wooden sleeper
to the grass below
is enough.

It’s enough to see
they fall
and are caught,
nestled between strong
grasses, resting on good earth.

Enough that once there,
they soften and grow.
Enough that they
unclench their
green fists
into open hands
as they spread slowly,
and ever wider,
across the grass
like cold, yellow butter.

They fall. They are caught.
They find a welcome,
a green place, all they need.

May our fallings
be so caught.
May we, after all,
come to rest in some new,
surprising place
where we flourish.

May we find that what
feels like a falling
is, after all, a running
over, an overflowing,
down, to some place
we had not known
before.
And may that
running over
be enough.