"Adoration of the Weed" by Dia Calhoun
Adoration of the Weed
A woman kneels in her backyard
at the far edge
a chapel quivers
only sometimes,
the yellow door a haze of sun
she can’t open.
She can hear exaltation,
the Veiled Sisters singing hymns
with the bees.
Adore the brawling blackberry.
Adore the dirt tracked in and never out.
Adore the broken back.
Adore the plundering buttercup.
Like hell.
The woman hacks the intractable
buttercups blooming.
Her head hangs like an anchor stuck on a rock,
neck a blaze of pain
chaining her head to her body
Adore.
Last summer buttercups
surrounded the pond.
She couldn’t stop them.
Not enough hours
hands burning
too many years
pulling out the everlasting
yellow, yellow, yellow.
Buttercups always come back,
like the eagle for the liver
of whatshisname who stole fire.
This summer they breached
the foundation of her house.
Adore.
She swats a bee.
Throws down her gloves.
Buttercups always come back.
Hands braced on her kitchen table
she watches buttercups erupt
through the floorboards.
One shy, green leaf hugs her foot,
another her knee, waist.
Legions break through her ribs .
Buttercups veil her heart.
Come, sister, sister . . .
Her breath creaks
like a hinge on the yellow door,
sings—
Adore the rock.
She is what cannot be pulled out.
Dia Calhoun
Dia Calhoun is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm (Atheneum, 2013, 2012). She won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Her poems have appeared in The EcoTheo Review, MORIA Literary Magazine, Writers Resist, and are forthcoming in And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow, a poetry anthology about Ukraine. An article on poetry craft, co-authored with Deborah Bacharach, is forthcoming in the Writer’s Chronicle. Calhoun co-founded readergirlz, recipient of The National Book Foundation Innovations in Reading Prize, and has taught at Seattle University, Stony Brook University, and The Cornish College. More at diacalhoun.com.
Headshot: Shawn Zink
Photo Credit: Staff