Gina Ogorzaly
Sinking my hands into soil
They morph into the Polish peasant hands
Of my ancestors, nails rimmed with dirt
Calloused palms, dry and hard.
Living on disrupted border lands
Of the Carpathian Mountains
They only wished to tend the earth
Peacefully, pluck the peach
From the tree, let its juice
Drip off their chins and laugh
With each other.
Sinking my hands into soil
I recall Dad’s victory garden
Tall with sweet Jersey corn,
My brother’s distaste for tomatoes,
Mom’s bet that he would love
Them by age seventeen
And so he did, all our sweet success
Snapping that first ripe tomato
Off the vine, that burst of flavor
That tantalizes far beyond Florida’s
Tasteless limestone produce.
Sinking my hands into soil
I sense Mom’s fishing line
Cast from my mind into her native bayou.
She gardened the deep South’s waters,
Rising early with her Dad
To catch the mosquito hungry bass.
I float along in the rowboat
Used by generations long dead and cousins still
In the silence of the bayou
Planting my seeds with a prayer
For rain in the high desert of my home
Gina T. Ogorzaly is a 68-year-old gardener who imagines she will be exchanging healing energy with Mother Earth well into her 90s.