My Freedom Lawn

 My Freedom Lawn

--the flag of my disposition—
is full of chickweed and wild violets
the way a child’s mind is full of games.
I say to my neighbors, Let’s play hide
and seek or roller bat sometime,
but all I get are sighs and headshakes,
their leashed dogs pulling nervously
past the waist-high wilderness
that surrounds our house.
To think that a blend of fescue
and rye, unmowed and unedged, says something
definable about the self
is a riddle I answer to suit myself.
To think that a plot of lawn grass
is me to neighbors is more than I hoped for.
I give my yard its freedom as a father
gives a child a box of crayons and paper,
hoping it will discover Eden.
The lawn is not the glacier nor the ocean
that once covered the ground here
with its secrets.
The self is not a green pasture to lie
down in nor a graveyard of unmarked regrets. You can’t step in the same lawn twice, or so they say.
If my neighbors erect molded concrete yard art and birdhouses, must I do the same?
What would it be like to find a satyr
in every blackberry bush,
a wood nymph behind every kudzu leaf?

John Blackard

John Blackard is a graduate of the University of North Carolina with advanced degrees in English Studies and Library Information Studies. He has three books of poems in print and a book about the golden age of paperback publishing. He has received Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He lives in Portland with his wife, the poet Valentina Gnup, and recently served as associate editor of Poetry Northwest.