Poetry: My Garden by Zoe Kimone
At Frontier, we’ve been compelled by the relationship of poetry and the sensation of roots—how do experiences that connect us to the deep past make us whole as humans? Zoe Kimone’s “My Garden” is a brief and beautiful exploration of that experience, a revealing of its simplicity and its earnestness.
My Garden
I have grown peppers just to watch them turn red. I have planted beans with dirty fingers and left them growing viny, leaning against the sun. I have loved collards while watching them wither. I have put my feet in the dirt until my soles turn black and there is dirt under my nails and in between my toes. I have grown tomatoes big, small, and bulbous.
No one knows what I whisper to the earth when I work it.
I wonder what my ancestors did in the dirt when no one was looking.
Zoe Kimone
Zoe Kimone is an emerging poet and essayist based in New York, NY. She has been the recipient of the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize for excellence in writing nonfiction prose awarded by the English Language and Literature Department of Smith College, for an essay which explored sound, movement, religion, and gentrification in Roxbury, Boston through a bike ride. She is an MFA candidate at Columbia University and is interested in the relationships between humans and their surrounding environments, specifically in cityscapes as well as family history, changing environments, public and private lives, and interconnected narratives.
