Ellaraine Lockie sent "The Mountaineer" a poem we had published before. Called "Abandoned Garden", the poem was just recently published in "Songs of Eretz Poetry Review". We had used this poem a year ago if memory serves but in the review Ellaraine said she was inspired by an article I had written about my grandmother's garden.
I wrote that story because all of her life, my grandmother planted flowers. I know she was told that if civilization was to come to these Montana range towns, it would be by the women planting flowers, building schools and churches and religiously attending every meeting of the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union) with meetings held in the basement of every church.
Then, years later, when I was a driver of Glacier National Park Red Busses, in the spring of the year I used to see the remains of gardens along Going-To-The-Sun Road. In the foliage hiding the remains of a cabin and barn, up would pop brilliant lupine every June. It must have been those same old women that planted on the prairie as well.
Here is what Ellaraine had to say about the poem.
" 'Abandoned Garden' is a composite poem in that it is the result of multiple experiences and observation. The initial idea came from a San Francisco museum drawing on crinkled handmade paper of a partially cracked and broken vase lying on its side out of which pansies spiked. The flowers were drawn progressively into butterflies that eventually flew away from the vase. I took a photograph of it and carried the image around knowing I would write about it. I put pen to paper every few days but couldn't get beyond the first four lines of the poem.
Months later I read a newspaper article by Robert Lucke, Editor of my Montana hometown newspaper, the "The Mountaineer", about his grandmother's prairie garden and I knew where I'd go with the poem----to my own grandmother's garden. Both were homesteaders, and some of my aunts and uncles had descendent plants from their mothers' gardens. With those thoughts and images, I wrote the middle section of the poem. The last stanza came from the pressed flowers that are still in the books I have which belonged to my grandmother."
Ellaraine's editor said, "I particularly enjoy the way Lockie metaphorically ties the lady to the land, as well as her use of words that evoke the senses. "Abandoned Garden" was first published in "The Bookman."
And now the poem...
Abandoned Garden
By Ellaraine Lockie
Lying on the long side of time
a particularly buried Meissen vase
Cracked like paper crunched in the fist of an accident
Its mouth growing sweet peas and pansies
A pioneer woman's attempt to civilize an untamed land
As though she were out gathering a bouquet for a quilting bee in her homestead house
when some tragedy befell her.
The house now as much a ghost as she
Yet she lingers in those immigrant flowers
that survive encroachment from native clover
blue flax, sage and morning glory
Butterflies that pollinate from one to the other
arbitrating the struggle
Like the diplomacy of a woman
caught between a hardcore German husband
and the America all around them
Between their children and the razor strap
that hung on the toolshed door
She lives in the flames of poppies she planted
that have burned through a century
of hailed-out crops, drought and grasshoppers
Today the prairie breeze breathes the same scent
as her heirloom handkerchiefs
the sweet violet toilet water sacheted to drawers
and splashed on after a water well wash
She lives in the pressed purple yellow
Pansies that look out from
A grandmother’s diary and recipe books
Butterflies as they take flight
In the draft of turning pages
