One bean grew down instead of up. Perhaps I planted
it wrong. For weeks, nothing. Then the soil moulded over with white fuzz
indistinguishable from perlite. I almost threw it away, but the child said hang
on and finally some odd, gnarly tooth-like roots anchored themselves upward
into air. Soon enough they understood and latched back downward into soil,
becoming rough green sutures across a heavy wound named not knowing.
Then the stem appeared. It had been growing underground. Like Persephone,
said the child. Her mother’s sadness is the reason we have seasons. The
child herself conceived after a spell of grief. Finally, the seedling righted,
curling back upward through its own looping cellulose. I thought it would
choke, cord wrapped around its neck, which happens in more than a quarter of
pregnancies. But this is not an uplifting poem about babies who face adversity
and thrive: dumpster babies, rubble babies, dog-mauled babies, raised-by-wolves
babies. Not a poem about losses, though we are often caught in the act of loss.
In the end, the bean grew up, threading the needle of its selfhood. Leaves
appeared, smaller than the rest. It’s a month behind the other shoots and who
knows whether it will bear fruit, though some small signs point to yes. But
help. Get me out of this poem about hope. I simply wanted to tell you how far a
bean will go to bend toward sunlight, looping around itself, rising wrongly,
before righting everything, a bona fide green cobra bobbing and weaving,
hypnotized, toward some higher power.
Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the 2020 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, Geist, Arc, and Prairie Fire. Her work has also been anthologized in Rewilding: Poems for the Environment and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. Originally from Vermont, land also known as Ndakinna, she is a longtime resident of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
