November, Remembering Voltaire
In the evenings
I scrape my fingernails clean,
hunt through old catalogues for new seed,
oil workboots and shears.
This garden is no metaphor—
more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt
with leaf-mold and bulb, plant into the oncoming cold.
Not that I ever thought
the philosopher meant to be taken literally,
but with no invented God overhead,
I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting
that ripens into soil,
in an old corm that rises steadily each spring:
not symbols, but reassurances,
like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long-
familiar book,
the known words barely listened to,
but joining, for all the nights of a life,
each world to the next.
— Jane Hirshfield