✨ At Six Months

isn’t old enough to be known...

At Six Months

Heavy things get seen like this—
not smart, not mean.
I know, I know, inside’s a seed
growing, dividing, it should make me
kind in my roundness. It kicks
the heaviness I am, and I
take it all, absorb the blow, the current
circling out in rings: mother
to be, to be, to be: inside
isn’t old enough to be known.
In a few more months, this counting
stops, and starts again on the clock’s
black dot. Look, in the corner of the yard,
what used to be a weed is measured
in circumference now, whose leaves are broad
and full of intention, tipped
to let the rain course down
the determined path to the determined vein.
Today someone said rest,
you deserve it. What does that mean?
And who am I now
if I call that bloom a tree?

—Lia Purpura

✨ This poem is offered as part of our April theme: Gardens & Greenhouses

From Stone Sky Lifting, Ohio State University Press, Copyright © 2000. Used by permission of Lia Purpura. See also All the Fierce Tethers, Sarabande Books, Copyright © 2019. Photo by name_ gravity, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.