[sweet/alyssum]

[sweet alyssum and borage in azure bloom in the salad the farm feeds the people who live here and twenty-nine other families] - Derick W. Burleson, July 2008

If I owned twenty-nine acres of land what could
 be done with all that bloom under azure sky?
Sweet cut-grass chaff rising

after mower's rotating blades.
 Simple cuts-chlorophyll

and drying hay and musk of a few horses.

The farm would feed my people: whomever
gathers to live on purple potato,

on bitter baby greens, white alyssum.
On each other, dropping silver hairs into the carved

wood salad bowl. Sharing water dipper, sharing beds.

 If I gathered spring borage, who would eat it?
Who eats the mushrooms I bring now,

pock-capped, spongy undersides, creamy icicles
grown from rotting but still-standing birch? Silage

of Sitka valerian, fern fiddleheads, and dark

brown chaga conks, wrested from trunk and boiled down.
White alyssum on the windowsill, silver

mushroom knife in hand. Yes, whomever gathered to live
on this farm would eat well, it's true. Horses whickering for garden

carrots as sky darkens to azure. What Magic is it

to feed other people, to use one's hands as tillers,
 to turn up from glacial loam an elixir on which to live?