Community Gardens
by Margarita Engle


One summer I was hired by an idealist
to serve as a door to door peasant
in the smoggy barrios of East Los Angeles.

My first duty was inviting frightened old women
and astonished junkies to step outdoors into sunlight
ignoring the concrete and smog, pretending we were perched
on the green hills of Michoacan or Oaxaca, Matanzas, Huehuetenango, Chichigalpa...

They came like pilgrims bearing shovels and hoes
each bird-heart of memory yearning to claim
a winged nest of fertile soil.

Together we knighted the land with metal tools
discovering earthworms and trapdoor spiders
as if it were the first time any forest dweller
had ever explored unpaved ground.

Corn, beans, tomatoes and chiles were planted.
The garden was fenced and guarded
by old men who remembered beauty.

Even the young men, decorated with tribal scars
from drive-by shootings, came bearing gifts
of fertilizer and mulch
to make their grandmothers happy.

The harvest was stolen, but drifts of wildflowers bloomed
like murals painted on soil, flowering proof that the earth
shares a memory of other places and other times.






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