Top Soil

Soil is
toil is earth
and garden path
miniscule minerals
dispatched to flower
patches of veg bound
round orderly borders
fork pricked
worm holed
shell holes
hell hole dug out
ditch and moat
sodden muddy crud
rudimentary bog

soil is
toilet is earth
closet of germs
seed germinator
grave robber
blood and bonemeal
grit for mill wheel
ground breakage
rusting reef of age
top-sheeted rock bottom
summum bonum*

* from Browning’s poem: “Summum bonum” Latin tr: the greatest good. 

Some crumbs of poetry for Bjorn’s Soil Poetics and a tardy entry for the imaginary garden’s Tuesday Platform

35 thoughts on “Top Soil

    1. Thank you Marian – had to finish on a climatic summation and Latin had it!

  1. Love the association with the word “soil”. And the nice flow of the structure and sound in this piece. Well captured!

    1. Glad you used the word structure because that is a key element of soil

    1. It was Björn’s theme – see above – and has so many connotation that built up here so thank you

    1. thank you Rosemary – a case of digging up soil sounds as well as synonyms 🙂

  2. Great stuff, I must come here more often, and the pink post was hilarious – but for some reason the comments section didn’t show up on that page. No matter, Here we are. And thanks.

    1. How strange – with your name it can’t be because you’re colour blind! Comments don’t show on front page – annoying & will see if there’s a fix for that. Thank you for looking further to comment – do come back 🙂

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