August 2025 - Rain
Even the most diligent and attentive of gardeners find themselves flummoxed by August. By this point in the summer, the amateurs’ early enthusiasms have flagged; and they either have packed it in for good or are gazing past their sere and surrendering beds to next year’s imagined glory. It is no small or simple thing to love a garden or a farm or an orchard...or a country. There is always only so much one can control. Yet, like loving parents, gardeners and farmers, orchardists and patriots are in it for the long haul. Each finds a way, like the poem’s “slow-soaking rain,” to tender care even under the most challenging of conditions.
Rain
By Merryn Rutledge
Catching the gardener’s eye as she moved
among the roses snipping faded blooms,
my beloved called, Just where do you clip
to encourage new buds to come?
When she smiled, he sang, What an evening!
lustily inhaling the musky, after-rain smell
and pointing out to passersby
the petals jeweled with tiny suns.
Before she could answer about the roses,
Martin offered how you could hose a garden,
even, as he once had, pipe water
from a mountain stream — and things will grow,
but lazily and pale, whereas a slow-soaking rain
somehow engages vitality.
A crowd began to gather as the gardeners
shared their avocation — the rose tender
stooping down between the bushes to show us
how she coaxed more blossoms to form.
She said a scientist once told her
twenty-seven conditions cohere when it rains.
Just think, she said and Martin did think,
raising his copious eyebrows to show it.
They met in silence then, as though to say
a gardener’s work is always awe.
Winner of Orison Books’ 2023 Best Spiritual Literature poem prize and a Naugatuck River Review 2024 Best Narrative Poem finalist, Merryn Rutledge is widely published. “Rain” is in her collection Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed (Kelsay Books). A second collection, To Carve a Path through Thickets will be published by Kelsay in 2026. Merryn lives in eastern MA, where she teaches poetry, reviews new poetry books, and volunteers for social justice.
