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by James Crews
I know it’s summer when we wade out
into the field and pick these crisp wonders,
tiny cucumbers bleached of their green
as if they’ve already seen too much
of this dazzling light, and can take no more.
We eat them sprinkled with salt and pepper,
as their name suggests, crunching through
flesh so sweet it’s like that of a melon.
I’ve never seen them for sale in grocery stores,
but they grow here in this soil out of which
my husband could coax almost anything
with his sure touch and sharp attention.
He snaps them from stems with flowers still
shriveled at the ends, then hands them to me
like the gifts they are, and I take each one
into the bowl of my hands, a wandering monk
finally at home among rolling mountains
swaddled in trees, and stones heaved up
as round as eggs from sandy loam. So much
already alive between us, so many blessings
threading our days like the gold of sun,
yet here I stand, holding this bounty,
begging for more.
From Bluebird, Green Writers Press, 2020.
Read this and other poems by James Crews in Bluebird, available for purchase online.
Living in cities and moving from place to place for most of my adult life, I had fallen out of the habit of gardening. Like many, I’d lost touch with the food I found for sale in grocery stores and even at farmer’s markets, forgetting the pleasure (and intense hard work) of being part of the growing process from beginning to end. It wasn’t until I moved to Vermont to live with my husband, an organic farmer, that I started feeling again what it was like to grow food and look after the land. Each summer day, I walked among the rows of farm fields with him, letting him teach me the names of all the vegetables, and harvesting what we needed for dinner—salad greens, heirloom tomatoes (Cherokee Purples became my favorite), basil, cilantro, and those crisp wonders I describe in this poem, the salt and pepper cucumbers. These walks reminded me of the gardens my father used to plant in our yard no matter where we lived, and I recalled how excited my brother and I felt every summer, to run out to our small plot and check on the progress of the carrots, zucchini, and cucumber plants going wild in the unrelenting Missouri sun. Living close to the land has returned me to the pleasures of being rooted in a single place, and has instilled in me a sense of gratitude for the work of those who grow our food. Whether you’re caring for a garden or tending to an entire farm, you can’t stray too far without ensuring that someone’s there to care for the plants you’ve been tending, and to receive the blessing of their abundance.
Invitation for Writing & Reflection: Describe a moment when you felt the abundance of your own life that you’ve tended up to this point coming full circle for you, when gratitude and a full presence took over.
ABOUT THE POET: James Crews
James Crews is the editor of several poetry anthologies: two anthologies: Healing the Divide, The Path to Kindness and the bestselling How to Love the World, which has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, as well as in The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment, and his poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and Prairie Schooner. James teaches poetry writing in the Poetry of Resilience seminars, and lives with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont. To sign up for weekly poems and prompts, visit here.
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