The Garden of Eden
"I pulled my scuffle hoe hard through the clay’s crust and heard the blade scrape metal and earth."
Romolo Tavani/AdobeStock
Today when the ground was no longer
too wet to work and the world was all lilac
perfume, I pulled my scuffle hoe hard
through the clay’s crust and heard
the blade scrape metal and earth.
I believed the sound came from nothing
more than a buried beer can tab
I dropped while foraging through
lettuce and sugar peas last spring.
But what surfaced from fresh manure
was my lost wedding band, buried for years
in earth that nurtures Love-Lies-Bleeding,
a ring from a forty-year marriage, rescued
from the filth of paradise, hosed off, shining,
my cracked fingernails caked with dirt.
Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Freud on My Couch.
