Gardening in the Shadows

 She found the old man kneeling in his garden:

he was wrestling weeds, and losing. But when he heard

her long green laugh, he grinned to himself, then rose

and brushed his gruffness off as he might dirt

(half-mournfully, and only half-

successfully). And when he spoke—

noticing her bare toes—he poured

a stream of tough amusement past

the broken gravel of his throat.

She cocked her head, heard his words gambol on,

then her turn came. There, rooted in place,

she stayed ten splendid minutes.

Ah, then, the two of them

groused their farewells

and pulled apart.

He would have been surprised

to learn she lingered,

watched him slowly stoop 

to smell the honeysuckle in the night.

From the Desk of the Poet:

Recently, I have been working on a cozy mystery with my cousin. I have also been juggling ideas for my next collection of poetry. "Gentlemen, I Praise You" to celebrate the older men in my life. You can read more about me on Amazon here.

Libby grew up in a small town but lived many years in the university town of Stillwater, OK. There she got her Ph.D. in English (literary criticism). In Stillwater, she lived also on a llama ranch that for a while included goats; two of the baby goats lived in her bathroom for a bit.

When Libby realized that she wanted to write poetry instead of analyze it, she started attending writers' conferences (Sewanee, Bread Loaf, Aspen). She has published poems in "Poetry" and in other journals.

In 2013, she self-published "Dancing with a Baptist." (A much earlier and different version of this work--"Sharing an Apple"--was a 1996 finalist in the National Poetry Series.)