A Prayer

I finally bought the book Bringing a Garden to Life by Carol Williams, and have been reading through it bit by bit every night as a kind of gentle, relaxing sedative (in a good way, it's not the least bit boring). When I woke up and saw this teeny peek of one of the chilled hyacinth blooms, it's shape made me think of a passage at the end of her chapter on bulbs.

"Planting spring bulbs is exercise for the imagination. Gardeners push wheelbarrows filled with bags of bulbs...over the dead leaves and black flowers of autumn, looking for good spots to plant. Skeletons of sunflowers hang their heavy seed heads to feed departing birds wheeling overhead. As they bury those gnarled onion shapes in the earth, gardeners gaze across half the year to green leaves, white stars, and golden trumpets."