Ploughshare

Ploughshare

I found it,
In clearing the garage, I’d got as far back
  As laid sedimentary layers can go,
The bottom of the allegorical archeological dig,
No more stone axe heads, arrow points, obsidian knives,
  Meaning here, the garage backwall

It’s white and pink and green with a shoulder strap,
It’s a Super Soaker, you can believe it?
  She bought it for a gardening tool!

“I hear if you fill it with bleach you can repel Woodchucks’” she’d tell me,
“I hear they don’t like the smell and if you hit them in the eye they really don’t like it”

She and her Father bragged of gardening as a perennial joy,
  Planting on a Saturday,
  Flowers in the sunset,
The camaraderie found setting out tarps before a frost,
  Deformed green tomatoes ripening on the sill

A garden joy totally eradicated when we walked out it it,
 “Oh look, a squirrel bit this tomato, just one bite and it’s ruined!” or
 “I just planted these sunflower seeds and all my shoots have been chewed by rabbits!”
  (Done later, I discovered, by gnawing Japanese beetles, come from miles around, attracted by the pheromone beetle trap they’d hung but feet from her seedlings, and doing more to bring in more by teasing sex than reducing any already here)

Their gardening was a counter insurgency,
  Fielding mines of fox urine scent darts,
Hav-a-hart traps for Groundhogs to be released miles away,
  Who then were seen again the next day,
And next the Super Soaker, that once innocuous commercial summer fun toy
  Refitted for a nuclear option,
Which, like of all war’s decisive options was soon obsolete,
  Thereafter abandoned in this arsenal of garden obsolescence, the garage

Which now I hung on the backdoor handrail,
  Where it looks, not the least,
  Like an antique bomber in a war museum

Time for a beer break from cleaning,
  Sipping in the garage doorway,
The old WMD didn’t seem so loathsome now,
  Pink handles, white gunstock, emerald water tank,
I fancied it a multi-colored balloon animal,
  The kind, which tied by birthday clowns,
  Spark happiness and chatter

And attracted, with curiosity, a humming bird,
  Emerald as the water tank, white underparts
  (only the males sport a ruby gorget)
Inquisitively inspecting the tank for flowering florets,
She the green drone, come to attend her mothership,
  Humming with a cat’s purr

Here was the garden I’d always yearned of,
  Why I hadn’t seen her before?