Summer's got your grass dry?

Mending Lawn

with a nod to Robert Frost

Every spring my neighbors rake the brown
patches on their lawns, plow up the paled
portions by the roots, scraping down
to the futile soil, which had failed

to deliver the lawn our watchful street
demanded. So the soil must be replanted—
tilled and seeded, watered, spread with peat
to hide the seed from birds. But I've recanted—

I've ignored my patch of yellowed lawn—
killed by bugs, they say—and I've neglected
mowing even though my grass has gone
to seed—the lawn so long that uncorrected

stalks now stand like tiny trees, offending
uniformity, which to my neighbors
equals beauty—their aesthetics tending
to affirm what symmetry belabors.

by Lee Warner Brooks

in volume 5 issue 1

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