Lying in the garden

Love-language of milk trees, blood trees, ghost trees –
a hydra of sap and xylem, every green stain a tenderness.
This is Homecoming, a configuration of what a house might be
when left to scaffold a forest. My dear, these branches are clumsy
and don’t know what to do to you. How to be civil in a garden
raked by guilt. How to gather your wingspan in my shattered hands,
and what to do with the feathers as they loosen. Love-language
of mudbanks, floodwaters, the curled bulrushes that hug to memory
like a suffix. I have been butchering the lyrics, hacking octaves
with my fat tongue. This feeling is non-falsifiable. I have no legroom
for two on a ride-on mower fashioned to endure every seatbelt sign,
every broken catcher, and every time you tell me this is enough.
How to be kind in a mixed-metaphor about grass. How to stranglehold
a lawn snake. How to not be a fire-hazard amongst dry straw.
How to be forgiven in a saltmarsh where I don’t know how to right
a sunken vessel. How to love a green shrub in a yellow meadow.

Elizabeth Morton

Elizabeth Morton is an Auckland spinner of poems and yarns, and an occasional academic. She has published three collections of poetry, the latest being Naming the Beasts (Otago University Press, 2022). Website