Second Place Winner, September 2005 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, September 2005

CRONE
      Catherine Rogers
      (Poets.org)

   Gather ye rosebuds while ye may...

Past fifty, and all the rosebuds gathered
that will bloom for me.
Tied in bunches and hung from rafters
to dry, they keep their creamy pink
and delicate perfume. Only the leaves
are brittle, tending to dust.

My back aches as I tend the autumn garden.
A sentinel crow watches from the top
of a lone pine. Now and again he makes
an observation, a throaty “uh-oh,”
like an amiable warning. It is gathering time.

Time to carry home
the last of the flowering year:
For healing, coltsfoot, feverfew and comfrey;
of thyme (which fair and tender girls
must not let young men steal),
enough to season winter;
here’s lovage yet– but little rue;
sage for longevity, and rosemary,
queen of clear memory, both in abundance.

That sentinel must have croaked all-clear,
for now there are a dozen on the lawn–
a murder of crows, wise eyes and heavy beaks
intent as surgeons, probing the earth. One
turns an eye to me as if to comment,
thinks better of it, rows himself into the trees.
The others follow, but they don’t go far.
After I’m gone, they’ll be here.

The house is quiet now, my darlings gone,
forgiven for the
ways they tore my body
and my heart. As night wind rises, I’ll take down
my mother’s book of poems and read aloud
to the accompaniment of rain’s steel drums
and autumn’s wild bassoons. I’ll go to bed
and leave the door unlatched. We’ll see
what the October wind blows in.

Judge Sarah Crown’s comments: “The poet quotes the first line of Robert Herrick’s ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’ at the beginning of the poem, and goes on to make a subtle, intriguing response to his claim that ‘That age is best which is the first,/ When youth and blood are warmer;/ But being spent, the worse, and worst/ Times still succeed the former.’ The speaker is a woman, ‘past fifty, and all the rosebuds gathered,’ whose children have left home, and who is now ‘tending the autumn garden.’ While she may have left off gathering rosebuds (now ‘hung from rafters to dry,’ they nevertheless ‘keep their creamy pink’), we find that there are plenty of other, perhaps more useful, things than rosebuds to gather: one by one, she picks ‘For healing, coltsfoot, feverfew and comfrey’; ‘sage for longevity,’ ‘rosemary, queen of clear memory’ and ‘thyme… enough to season winter.’ The crows which circle her garden are classic harbingers of death (and may, of course, be echoes of herself, the ‘crone’ of the title); they leave but ‘don’t go far.’ She, however, is unafraid: in the final lines (my favourites) she goes to bed and ‘leave[s] the door unlatched. We’ll see/ what the October wind blows in.’ The poet refuses to respond to Herrick’s clichéd view of youth with her own cliché of age; instead, s/he presents it to us truthfully: nuanced, complex, neither bad nor good, but different.”