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Jenna is a rising 9th grader with a specialized track for Medical Services.  Jenna hopes to study medicine and become a neurologist. In her spare time she enjoys volleyball, travel, photography and hanging out with her friends.

Anyway, finding starts of the heirloom tomato varieties I like—green zebra, striped German, Cherokee purple, Kellogg’s early breakfast—proved fruitless, except for Brandywines, which a local nursery operator grows to oblige a patron’s special yen.  I had to settle for hybrid lemon boys for yellow tomatoes, and I picked up the Romas just because, and some Moscows, because they’re always good to have around, when you can get them.  At a Walmart in Cortez, Colorado, I was pleased and surprised to discover some hearty German Johnsons for sale.  I used to grow this variety from seed years ago but haven’t been able to find a source.  If all goes well, I’ll be able to build my heirloom garden from these plants.  I also picked up some Mr. Stripeys at Walmart—another large-fruited heirloom tomato variety, similar in appearance to the robust-looking, sweet-to-the-tongue, delight-to-the-eye Striped Germans I like to grow.

I sprouted some of my Italian parsley from generic seed this year, ending up with more plants than I need.  My basil seedlings came up all right, but they suffer stress every spring from hammering winds that stunt the growth of their earliest emerging leaves.  I try to bring them inside when the winds start but am not always home to rescue them.  Because of teeming populations of grasshoppers in the yard—most of them in size well ahead of the similarly teeming population of praying mantises—I sequester the basil in pots up on the second story porch, higher than hoppers can hop.  Also I grow some of my parsley up there where it’s easy to reach when I’m cooking.  At a nursery in Colorado, I found a lovely lemon grass plant.  I’m keeping that as a potted porch plant, too.

My herb bed came back strong this year, with my culinary sage producing many sagelings in the shadows beneath its leaves.  Chamomile, lemon thyme, lemon balm, spearmint (a lackluster variety—where’s the garden “delete” button?), oregano, chives, tri-color sage, volunteer parsley and dill, tarragon, rosemary, and escaped flowers are working on filling this bed to its brim.  One of our Woodhouse’s toads has also shaped a cozy home for itself in the herb bed, but my daughter is writing about that fun discovery, so I won’t spoil her punch line.

After many unsuccessful years of trying to start my own peppers from seed—sweet peppers, jalapenos, and Anaheims—I achieved good germination this time around by keeping the seed flats on top of the clothes dryer, which provided the bottom-heating that peppers in my care seem to require to get a decent start.  When I put the seedlings in the garden, I had to protect them from the winds, just like the basil.  So I asked my daughter to cut midsections from her dad’s empty liter soda bottles and I used them to gird up the seedlings’ loins.  I did the same with the broccoli starts, to good effect.  If they hadn’t had their pop bottle blast shields, the wind would have snapped off vital parts, perhaps to the point of destroying whole plants.  In the broccoli bed, I’ve put in a couple of golden zucchini plants—an heirloom variety from Seed Savers.  I intend to collect seed from those this year. Yellow crookneck in another bed—my squash of choice.  Moon and stars watermelons that I don’t know if I planted soon enough for them to come to anything.  I’ve also got Straight 8 cucumbers growing—sort of—and a variety of potato a neighbor gave us.  Don’t know what it is—it’s a flavorful, grainy, white variety.  We like these mystery potatoes very much and have planted the strain for three years now from mini-spuds that we reserve as seed.  Volunteer potatoes sprouted in the bush Blue Lake green bean bed—more than I expected.  Guess I didn’t sift the dirt carefully enough.

An especially nippy spring pinched every single blossom off our two, barely more than sapling Elberta peach trees.  So no peaches this year.  But the trees are taking advantage of their untaxed condition, pushing out emerald clouds of creased, crescent-shaped leaves on thickets of new shoots.  You can’t tell by looking at the trees that I pruned them in the spring, they’ve already become so shaggy.  No peaches?  Well, the trees look great.  I’m happy for them.

My garden definitely has a wild edge to it, to the point of having in some places no edges at all. The borders have become overgrown, for the most part, with flowers that decided to grow outside the box. The flax I planted in the flowerbed has spread north and west into the yard.  Flax plants two and three years old and standing around 24” tall grow in fringes around the vegetable beds.  They’re a bit much to wade through, but I like the fountain-like look to their stalks and sprays, and when they open their sky-blue flowers in the morning, they spangle glory left and right.  Red hot pokers—also known as Mexican Hats—have likewise escaped the bed and are growing in tall clusters around the other beds, studding the spreading green with their ruffled, dark-red-velvet skirts.  At the corner of the bed where I’m growing my Big Bertha and red bell peppers as well as the three Mr. Stripeys, a wild, silver sage has taken root.  I’m not sure what to do about it since it’s laid claim to soil beneath the rock wall surrounding the bed.  I can’t dig it out and replant it without dismantling the wall.  And I must say that the piquant fragrance it releases each time I brush by during my watering duties is enough to justify tolerating its presence for another year or two, before it grows big enough, slurping up garden water, to take down the rock border itself, not knowing its own strength.

The dianthus—“Sweet Williams”—and the Shasta daisies, the black-eyed Susans and the baby’s breath all came back but are struggling against my neighbor’s alfalfa, which has invaded the flowerbed’s northernmost corner. I’m unhappy with the alfalfa’s obnoxious tenacity but unsure what to do, especially since the bees, hoverflies, and a variety of tiny wasps harvest from the blossoms.  The black-eyed Susans are showing impatience with the alfalfa oppression and appear to be migrating to open areas outside the bed.  Echinacea (purple coneflower—in this case, I think Echinacea angustifolia) has come back strongly, putting out just under a dozen, thin-rayed, cone-eyed stars.  This is a wonderful plant and I have every intention of seeing to its continued comfort.  Other flowers whose names I’ve forgotten put out yellow blossoms, or saffron-colored blossoms with dark, reddish-brown centers.  Few if any bachelor’s buttons that started out in the flowerbed grow there anymore.  Confirmed drifters, they’ve taken to yard space beyond their point of origin, with a pink cluster showing up as far away as thirty feet northeast of their first residence up at the edge of the raised bed where I’m growing the Brandywines.

There are weeds—goat’s beard, wild lettuce, green amaranth, bindweed, others—whose presence I need to address.  Alfalfa-like plants I see growing wild in the canyon that like dampness discovered the garden water and now spread their own green fire, one I’ll have to address.  But right now they have yellow blossoms that the pollen-gatherers like, so I’m waiting to cut them down when the blossoms have mostly withered.  A lot of work to do.  But we all know and accept that about gardens—that they need attention, balance, and a bit of intelligent design to complement vegetables’ and flowers’ natural proclivities.

But every year, there are unimagined surprises. Here’s an example. Two days ago I went out to do touch-up watering with my el-cheapo two-gallon can.  I run the sprinkler (I know, I know—drip irrigation is the future goal) by setting it up on a board I place across the wheelbarrow to raise the nozzle high enough to cover as much garden as possible per watering.  The wheelbarrow acts as a catch basin for water leaking or running backward from the sprinkler, and it’s into this well I dip my watering can.  As I drew water, I noticed movement in the swimming depths of the barrow.  A black aquatic beetle, about a half or three-quarters of an inch long, had taken up residence in the artificial pool and was rowing about madly, perturbed over my activities.  Feeling dismayed because I intended to dump the remainder of the water into the potato bed, I tried to encourage the insect to leave.  It could only have gotten into the wheelbarrow by flying, so I supposed that if I made life uncomfortable the creature would simply choose to fly elsewhere.  I dipped and dipped, but the beetle stubbornly stood its ground—or rather, kept to its depths, even as seas turned turbulent and waves sloshed and rolled from the dipping.  Finally, all garden watering done, I faced the prospect of dumping the rest of the water onto the potatoes, beetle and all.  Rolling the wheelbarrow over to the bed in question, I tipped it up to let the remaining water pour out.  I expected the beetle to go with it, and, faced with such a compelling argument, to recover its dignity and fly off to plumb more promising depths.  But no.  It clung tenaciously to the wheelbarrow’s side, and when I settled my one-wheeled wonder onto its rests, the beetle headed for the thin skin of water slipping back into the bottom and settled into the dregs.

So I relented.  I pushed the wheelbarrow over to where I intended to do the evening’s watering and where it would once more gather depth from the sprinkler.  I took the watering can upstairs and filled it about two-thirds full.  I carried that water back downstairs to the garden and added it to the remains in the wheelbarrow to provide the beetle a more satisfying habitat until I watered when the sun went down and the sprinkler once more filled the well.  If the beetle wanted the wheelbarrow and could handle the stress of my own use of it, then it was welcome to stay.  As the water poured in it skittered madly then once the turbulence stopped settled against the bottom of the wheelbarrow.  I set the board over it to protect it from the sun and went back upstairs and into the house.  The next day, I checked the wheelbarrow for the beetle before beginning my touch-up watering.  It had moved on.

Where snow petals blew
From winter orchards swallows’
Wings fledge summer light.

Late afternoon came floating down the creek.
Appalachia’s air chilled gradually,
The valley’s likenesses on deeper pools
Shivering as mayflies burst the watercolor
Skins, and theirs, taking to air, trailing
Papery past selves after them in flight.
Brown trout missiled the sylphs, arched and slapped
The surface, falling back, while I cast toward
A trembling pool, slowly wound my line in,
Looked up. He was wading toward the nearest bank
Where yellow tiger lilies thrust their heads
Above mad tangles of grass trailing the current.
Feeling through many years of wandering round him
The gravity of some intent, I followed close
And broke the silver ripples of his wake.
“Let’s take the path.  We’ll cross again above,”
He said.  I understood just where, and so
We clattered on the gravel with empty creels.
In an abandoned orchard, adolescent
Apples swelled, stone green, not yet much burden
On their boughs. We plucked wild blackberries
Dripping among thorns, filling our mouths
With fruit still warm from standing in the sun.
A stalk of goldenrod, its bud crown forming,
Jutted shoulders and head above the rest.
One of its leaves dipped lower.  There, beneath it,
A butterfly hung folded for the night.
Here was something to show; I called him round—
“Watch this”—and putting out a youngster hand,
Which shook, I slipped a finger through its legs
And so became its leaf.  Its filaments
Shuffled for a hold upon my skin,
And there it dangled, groggy-sensed, and free.
“The thing is holding me.”  I thought of all
The butterflies I had kept caged
Inside that hand, beating wild against
My skin, and I, wounded, sprung my finger
Bars at blows softer than sleeper’s breath
And watched the insects stagger, fear-drunk, to the air.
Then, left looking at my dusted fingers,
I shamed my motives and hungered by that shame.
“Here, hold.”  He reached out his work-etched hand.
The fumbling creature hooked its spurs and clung,
Still, like dew.  The valley’s dusk set deeper.
We set the insect beneath its shelter-leaf.
“Come on,” he said.  “We’ve got to cross the creek.”
We crossed the creek, me feeling the way after
Through flowing shadows, a waterway turned velvet
Dark of forest face and leafy, long
Reflection, and he an image fading off the stream.

The winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff’s Admin Award is Gabriel Aresti Jr. (aka Ángel Chapparo Sainz) for his poem, “Nospringland.” For his prize, he chose to receive Warren Hatch’s Mapping the Bones of the World.

All the poems submitted to the Spring Poetry Runoff form a stunning garden of springtime delights and more than fulfill the celebration’s intent to welcome spring via communal voice.   The fine language of many of the poems attracts my attention sharply.  But I had to choose one.  I chose “Nospringland” for the Admin Award for its heart, its sentiment, and—against all its appearances of being a simple poem in language and form—the intricate way it threads into a complex tapestry—the Basque separatist movement in the poet’s homeland.  “Homeland,” of course, is the matter the conflict holds in question.  Also at the heart of the conflict—preservation of the unique Basque language.  The poet’s choice to write and send an English-language poem reflecting the conflict’s effects upon him personally is itself a complex act, not the least of it being the sharing of heartfelt experience with an English-speaking audience.  Furthermore, given the Basque language’s importance to the decades-long conflict and to the poet’s identity, seemingly obvious lines such as “There is no more poetry for your fight” acquire iceberg-like ironic depth and weight.  As I mentioned in the comments on that poem, the use of punctuation—another seemingly simple pattern of choices—also intrigues me for the effects it exerts on the poem’s tone.

While “Nospringland” ran counter-clockwise to the general tone of the Spring Poetry Runoff, I found the poem’s language a deeply moving and necessary reminder that spring does not appear the same to all eyes.  What I might take for granted as a season to gather in communal festivities can in another invoke, in the changing of light and flowering of warmth and spring colors and in shared language, painful ironies of separation and the continued intrusion of the killing season into a celebrated time of rebirth.  Thanks, Ángel, for sending that poem.

While readers and participants choose the winner(s) of the Spring Poetry Runoff Contest Popular Vote Award, WIZ admin will be choosing the winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff Admin Award.   Winners of both awards will be announced in a post on Monday, May 10.

Winners will receive as prizes either Lance Larsen’s Backyard Alchemy or Warren Hatch’s Mapping the Bones of the World.

Rules for voting:

1.  Each voter should select his or her 3 favorite poems of the 21 eligible.
2.  Each voter can vote only one time–no multiple-vote-ballot-box-stuffing shenanigans, please.
3.  Voters are encouraged to read every poem before voting.  Click here to read all of the eligible poems. Please note: Because there are 21 poems total, you’ll need to click on “Previous Entries” twice in order to read them all. The full text of longer poems won’t display on the list pages, so right clicking and opening each poem in a new tab or window is a good approach.
4.  Participating poets and WIZ readers may encourage friends and family members to read and vote.
5.  All participating poets are encouraged to vote whether their poems were published in the contest category or in the non-contest category.

Instructions for voting:

Click on the small square box next to the name of the poem that you wish to choose.  A green or black check mark will appear in that box.  If you accidentally check mark the wrong box or change your mind, simply click on the box again and the check mark will disappear.  After you have check-marked your 3 favorite poems (you will see 3 check marks on the page), click on the “Vote” box at the bottom of the page.   Clicking on that box will end your voting session, so be sure you’ve finished voting before you click “Vote.”  To see the tally of votes so far, click “View Results.”

But here at WIZ, our nearly six-week flow of sparkling verse has finished.  The last poems have posted, and voting to decide which one wins the Spring Poetry Runoff contest will begin Monday, May 3rd,  and run through Friday, May 7th.  Poets, please come back and vote, and let your friends and family members know about the voting, too.

I’d like the thank–happily, exuberantly–all the poets who contributed to the Spring Poetry Runoff not only for participating beautifully but also for exceeding my expectations for the number of poems submitted.    There really was a spectacular turnout, and I’m in awe of the quality of the poems.  Very well done, folks.

The poll to determine the winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff Popular Poem Award will close Friday. May 7, but winners of both the popular vote and the Admin Award will be announced Monday, May 10th.   So keep an eye on WIZ to see how matters settle out.  Also, clean off your reading glasses.  Twenty-one poems qualified for the voting, any one of which can cause you to linger.   Another matter to consider: Each voter will be able to vote for his or her three favorite poems!

Again, good work, participants.  Stay tuned.

Spring brightens nearly too late, me panting
For light.  Then with summer the full gasp at last
Revives one more solstice in the blood.

In my high and thieving youth
I gorged on the sun’s confections—
Cherries, peaches, apples—
That spring’s flower and summer’s
Hot honeyed shine bent
To my fingertips.

Now I hoard against the lightshed
Of winter equinox fruit
Others pick.  But these run out
And the sun gets no better.
Oblique, if not of its own angle,
From slants of storm.

When we think of resurrection,
(And we must think of it—
God’s Will or No
Science writhes from that grave
Cocoon toward winged athanasia),
Should that day of first glory break
On winter’s dawn and I by some
Unforeseen chance am called,
I shall not answer by any name.
There will not be enough holy apples
Growing in God’s mind to give me rise.
Cute Science will not tease me past the snow.

But for whatever glory ascends toward summer’s spire,
With the wisdom of a potato in a root cellar
My strands will feel end and beginning
Peel apart and the earth lurch beneath wing
Beats of swallows working airy theorems
Across the blue board. “That,” I will say,
“That is the word I lay wanting,”
And up I’ll come from must with earthwise toads.

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*Non-contest submission*

Once-melting drifts of speckled snow
grew stiff against the freezing ground.
The humid gusts abandoned hope
and left the air without a sound.

What once was flowing now was tamed;
the rivulets, muddy and curled
lost strength and stream, as puddles became
glass windows to the underworld.

As April’s harbinger, the hawk
should sense the shifting of the sun.
A general in retreat would know
what day the winter war be won.

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Alan Mitchell has served on the AML board, and is the author of an award-winning novel, Angel of the Danube. He has recently started an LDS publishing company, Greenjacket Books (greenjacketbooks.com), and has a new book that expounds the global economic crisis in view of latter-day prophecy. He has served in numerous ward callings and currently as ward music leader. He ranches in the west desert of Utah, where he and his wife have been named 2008 Ranchers of the Year by the Society for Range Management.

*Contest entry*

crimson-honey sky
across the Hokianga
crimson-honey tide
but no waka to pierce
the bay’s narrow hips

*

crimson-honey sand
across the Hokianga
crimson-honey sky
but only one cumulus
to lick the bay’s narrow tongue

*

crimson-honey night
across the Hokianga
but no moon
to walk empty shores
sip crimson-honey tea

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For Tyler’s bio and other Spring Poetry Runoff contributions, click here and here.

*Non-contest submission*