Poetry’s strength resides in its words and punctuation. Consider the “still” in Claudia Borowicz’s “September Tomatoes”:
The whiskey stink of rot has settled
in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises
when I touch the dying tomato plants.
Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms
flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots
and toss them in the compost.
That “still” speaks to a defiance, a desperate clinging to life even as the plants die and the speaker pulls the plants “up by the roots.” The word establishes contrast, as do the visceral verbs and prepositional phrases. The plants, those “tiny yellow blossoms,” flail even as the speaker does what she has purposed, what she has done every September: “pull the vines up by the roots.”
The speaker recognizes the violence in her actions. She says in stanza three:
It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.
Her words also hint at a desire to not have to destroy her work. She hopes, even if optimistically, unrealistically, for the flowers to fruit. The speaker wants summer to continue, not to turn to fall and winter. She wants life to continue, not this slow descent into decay—the “stink of rot”—and death.
At the same time, the speaker acknowledges the impossibility of her wish. The next stanza shifts to her great-grandmother, which can seem abrupt, a strange shift from direct experience to memory. The speaker says:
My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village
as they pulled the flax. Songs so old
and so tied to the season that the very sound
seemed to turn the weather.
But the movement, however sudden, reflects reality. The mind easily leaps from what’s in front of it—the plants in need of pruning—to an associated event, in this case, the great-grandmother singing of seasonal songs. Both the speaker’s and the great-grandmother’s acts help them transition from one season to another. In fact, their very acts seem to “turn the weather.”
One could go so far as to posit the action, of either pruning or singing, is a liturgy. The motion, the event, shapes time. It mourns what is being lost or has been lost while heralding what is to come. The act is both reflective and anticipatory, somehow holding life’s fragility and the cyclical nature of the seasons in tension.
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