“though he were dead, yet shall he live”
Ah yardwork, not gardening, for I am ineluctably American. I do not finesse and I do not plant little flowers. I chop and rip, I should have a machete, not clippers.
My daughter sat in her cat chair and rhapsodized a song about a heroine who built the “tower, the Tower of London” and then is imprisoned in said Tower, only to be rescued by a boy named Elmer. Fucking Disneyplots! Still, the song was lovely….
As for me, I was happily and mindlessly raking up the thick coat of leaves until I struck and killed a hidden toad with my rake. This was upsetting, for he was huge and sentinent looking. And he looked, in his inverted dead state, like a full-sized human heart, just laying there damp on the scruff.
I turned my attentions to other parts of our pocket garden. I thought about writing a poem about it, the rake bit, the toad bit, the heart bit. Random death from the air at the end of a HomeBase bought metal rake, all in the midst of warm and wet and animally leaf-sleep.
When I turned back to see once again, the toad was gone! Lazarus toad! I started to tell my daughter about Lazarus when she asked, but couldn’t make it through for it is a silly, silly story.
The fucker ruined the poem too. But I’m glad he’s still alive, if poked and bleeding and less certain about his world than he was a few minutes ago…
ads without products 
Brilliance, going unnoticed in the mellee of things,
respfully, I bow to you.
Tom. Liverpool, UK.
Tom McFerran
April 24, 2009 at 10:04 pm