Raking Leaves
Raking leaves
is an exercise in the good-enough.
You will never get them all.
You come to prize
the strong, steady stroke of the rake,
the appropriate armful that you lift
into the waiting wheelbarrow.
The maple leaves which from a distance
appear two-tone, red and silver,
reveal a soul-satisfying palette
from crimson to lavender.
A leaf falls in your hair and tickles your neck.
You cover the lily beds
with their winter blanket,
a gorgeous quilt
in five-pointed patchwork.
You’re no good at quilting, but it doesn’t matter.
Raking leaves is an object lesson
in Lamott’s “shitty first drafts.”
From Guest Contributor Cheryl Caesar
Cheryl lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and taught literature and phonetics. She now teaches writing at Michigan State University. Last year she published over a hundred poems in the U.S., Germany, India, Bangladesh, Yemen and Zimbabwe, and won third prize in the Singapore Poetry Contest for her poem on global warming. Her chapbook Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era is now available from Amazon and Goodreads.