• Garden in Hawaii, palm trees, araucaria
    Inspiration

    A Garden Poem to Relax Your Spirit

    I love how reading a poem can almost instantly alleviate stress. So I thought I’d share this sweet bit of verse from W.S. Merwin. Not only does it capture the beauty of an everyday moment, it tells us a little story. We learn about the narrator’s history, age, and how his garden exists with or without him. Merwin lived for many years in Hawaii, restoring a few acres of treed land he preserved as the Merwin Conservancy (not pictured above). Lucky for us he did.

    If you need a silent moment of relaxation, read this. You can hear the soft chiming as if you were there.

    Garden Music

    In the garden house
    the digging fork and the spade
    hanging side by side on their nails
    play a few notes I remember
    that echo many years
    as the breeze comes in with me
    out of the summer light
    they know the notes by now
    so well that the music
    seems to be going on
    all by itself in the shade
    of the roof I made for them
    half my life ago
    and I see the garden now
    far away in itself
    reflected in the polished spade
    as a place I have never been
    while the music goes on
    echoing the days

    –W.S. Merwin, from The Moon Before Morning, (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). Copyright 2014 by W.S. Merwin.

    For another garden poem by W.S. Merwin, click here.