Mr Hobby's Poppies - a garden poem

Keeping on with my garden implements poems, here's an old one of mine which first appeared in Southerly back when Elizabeth Webby edited it, and subsequenly ended up in a collection, from thence it will reappear soon in my Undercover of Lightness: New & Selected Poems from Ralph Wessman's Walleah Press. It's at the printers now and will be launched in Hobart on 29th March.

Mr Hobby’s Poppies

One poppy bends in the wind

precarious as

my memory of our driveway

bordered by poppies—

yellow, orange, white—

planted by Mr Hobby

knobbly old gardener who

spent one day a week

at our home.

Although we could afford

a dozen new sprinklers

he strapped and washered

old piping together

to create his own.

No better portrait

could have been

sculpted of the old

scrawny scarecrow

rusty brown and bent

torn cloth chokers

stained and wet.

They stuttered

and barely worked

all summer.

One poppy in the wind

rewinds me

forty years …

- Andrew Burke