A Healing Garden Poem by Sandy Fulton

There are gardens that weary us, gardens that never flower,
but most are healing gardens that teach us truths—
like the Garth in the cloister of my church in East Mount Airy,
beneath our Black Lives Matter banner,
where some day I will have my ashes scattered,
mixed with my dead son's, to fertilize the flowers.

Another garden in West Mount Airy still thrives ten years
after I moved away. It faces morning sun and evening shade,
next to hilltop steps leading to a triplex where I rented the second floor.
I terraced the hill and planted this garden for fifteen years:
pansies, dusty miller, petunias, impatiens, crocus,
tulips, scented mint, amaryllis, Asiatic iris, hydrangea.

This was my own healing garden. It gave me exercise and sun
as I recovered from knee replacements, an angina attack,
the exhaustion of a work day in Center City
and endless activities with other veterans and friends for justice,
to renew our country's highest visions, to end war, to save life
from the liars who call themselves pro-life but are not.

The blue-green leaves of hosta were my terrace garden's pride,
and the centerpiece is still the beautiful spreading life
I call the Survivor. Like bamboo and aloe and lotus,
it made its own babies, propagating secretly by rhizomes—
stems that crept underground in the winter, shooting
new teeth upward when the weather warmed.

Then a pale blue central peduncle sprouted white trumpets
that stood tall or dangled, rimming the leafy center—
until in this century's fifth year, a year of drought,
some trumpets dropped off, a few leaves burnt and withered.
I photographed my wounded hosta in July, but when I bent low
I heard its trumpet flowers blaring Victory! It truly was a Survivor.

Burnt leaves and fallen flowers are not death, but a badge of honor.
It's Flower Power that teaches us to survive, revive and thrive.
We veterans and our allies carry Flower Power everywhere,
even to Pentagon rifles. Hostas, too, know the secret of survival,
to rest and mend, and use all their innate strengths until fully healed,
ready to spring up, to occupy, to spread and to live