Pulling Weeds

Guess what I did this weekend? And I thought, before I finished writing this Sunday offering, that I'd write something inspired by and an echo of the tone of this little excerpt from Thoreau's Walden:

Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds — it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor — disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood — that's pigweed — that's sorrel — that's piper-grass — have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.

Instead, I found something else. A bit darker.

Pulling Weeds

I must hunker in the dirt

knees hammered in mud

in order to do this work

Must stoop down so close

that I can inhale dark

earthy scent of moist decay

Must pry through shoots

follow webs of vines grown

in complex tangled labyrinths

Must trace them to the source

entwine my fingers,  grasping 

each stem to pull by its roots

Must wrest twisted undesired

invaders that choke out lush

and verdant delicate blossoms

I must spend days here or weeks

here or months and years here

prostrate to this never-ending task