A GARDEN POEM

by Robert Cording

A garden is both personal and private,
A place that is its own world,
A place that engages the imagination as well as the senses.

Among other things it is a passage to somewhere else –
To the personal and shared past its scents evoke,
To the distant places to which its forms allude.

Trees, flowers, water.
From the shade of a maple,
A warbler sings in Spring’s muscular blossomings.

Water spills from stone to stone and disappears into the pool below,
Everything is growing,
Changing with the light that dapples a patchwork of sun and shade,
And delights with quick transformations of colors.

A garden is full of the distance we call dreams.
Dreams of home, of family, of friendship.
A garden is a place that is its own world and ours.

To make a garden is to honor life and its blessings,
To make a garden is to come home.