Ashes Make My Flowers Bloom

The maples let the sunshine in, Dappling my compost bin, And framing the pallet perches Of two enormous crows.

Empty bins in my woodshed spoke To my kitchen’s air of pine log smoke, That washed the dim-lit cold days Between the equinoxes.

Plastic sheets and screws foretold The raising of a hothouse on old Beds of greens and herbs In the lee of my Western hill.

I’ve often marveled, when I looked, At the sweat, dumb luck, and grit it took To coax this leafy idyll From the ashes of my city.