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Spiced

From Volume 20.3 (1999)

That day I held my head in my hands,
crouching on the dry soil
of what had been our garden,
and you seemed to tower over me, the way
the sunflower lords itself over mint:
head sternly bent, supple, transient,
while I fell uprooted across the flagstones.
Things that we see as ornamental
grow fundamental, like the leaves
and wild blossoms withering on the lawn
at the end of a backbreaking weeding session;
they, like the sunflower, like the massive
blueberry bush or thick thorny rose,
each plucked from the same earth,
would still have soil clumped to their roots
as if everything varied is joined, strangely, underground.
After we separated, I noticed that pulled weeds
sometimes re-root after a few rains
if left uncollected on the ground,
a kind of resurrection before death.
Sometimes, things escape.
Sometimes, green and spiced,
they rise from the same vivid earth.

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Vol. 44, No. 1

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Tomas Venclova

Literature & Democracy

Tomas Venclova

“A principled stance against aggression should never turn into blind hatred. Such hatred does not help anyone to win . . .”

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