Opinion: Why gardens and poems rhyme

(CNN) — On a recent morning, unearthing our postage-stamp front yard garden from a second winter of atmospheric rivers, I saw one monarch butterfly amid our plum blossoms —  a rare sight in a year when monarch populations are at an all-time low.

I’d gone out to rake leaves, lay compost and weed the artichokes we grow on the strip between the sidewalk and the street. I’d been a bit impatient, grumpy even, hacking away. I also discovered that the rhubarb is coming back, that the tree collards are up; that our woody Thai basil wintered over. I discovered that some shiso, which a kind neighbor offered me last spring, and which seemed a failed experiment by fall, had only been fooling me —  it is not only not dead, it now has 10 new sprouts.

By the time the butterfly came by, I found that I was quite still, delighting in its presence, imagining those fragile wings on their long, difficult migration. I came inside feeling grateful to have unearthed both the texture of my own heart and of the day. I felt more able to settle into my other work, which is writing, and particularly writing poems.

In an often-furious world, I come to gardens and poems because in dense quick space, they reroute me, surprise me and remind me of the joy of savoring life on our fragile, complicated, endangered planet. This year, particularly, I’ve been meditating on the fact that gardens and poems share critical, linked invitations.

Both offer us space to acknowledge the beauty and complex grief, of say, seeing one lone butterfly fly through a rapidly changing climate, to remember our interconnection and hunger for beauty, even as we face down a present that’s full of violence, intolerance, war. Each process can be a small but still practical place of re-routing, in the midst of political fury and climate grief. In fact, against a tide of weariness, fear or despair, I have two small pieces of advice on this Earth Day, embedded in National Poetry Month: start a garden, (even one plant!), and read or write a poem.

Why? Because in the face of all that seems intractable, ugly and downright depressing about our struggles to coexist justly with one another, gardens and poems each build ecosystems of nourishment and possibility, what English poet Andrew Marvell called green shade. Gardens and poems remind us how to admire, steward and participate in our own lives and in the life of the planet, even a planet it seems we’ve irrevocably damaged.

And because even as the planet warms, gardens and poems help cool us off, practically and emotionally. As we undertake the work of bringing the world’s temperature to some safer margin, and as we try to imagine how to work toward compassion and repair in our human relationships, the green shade of a garden and the rich words of a poem can offer models of gracefulness, surprise, and imaginative possibility. They are places to practice listening to others in the human and nonhuman world. They remind us of the beings with whom we share oxygen, water, light. These oases help us to root in place and time, to attune to possibility — one grosbeak, one stanza, one endangered butterfly at a time.

I don’t think I’m overstating the case to say that time spent with poems and gardens build pathways that actually repair us. Gardens are centers for diversity — they build abundant community from the soil up. Diverse microbes of healthy soil absorb more carbon than depleted soil. From that soil up, gardens invite in other life in diverse webs as well: I’ll never forget when a visiting entomologist at the Warren St. Marks Community Garden in Brooklyn said that the garden, on the reclaimed site of two fallen Brooklyn brownstones, supported 42 species of pollinators, while other Brooklyn blocks only had 2 or 3.

We are desperately in need of these oases of pollinators. For one thing, this type of outer diversity nourishes our neural pathways. Even five minutes with a tree or flower helps people regulate stress, to emerge rested and curious and compassionate while facing the world around them. This space compounds its benefits: Our community garden in Brooklyn supported a diversity of human gardeners as well, people who would walk home from a day harvesting tomatoes, bestowing a few on their neighbors.

In their own small plots, poems build diverse networks as well: Sinking into the rhythms and pleasures of literature stimulates the parts of our brains attuned to empathy, helping us build attention, kindness, compassion, regard. Engaging poems (and taking part in the arts generally) has practical benefit at a wider community level: A critical study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that people with longitudinal engagement with the arts were more likely to vote, more likely to be leaders in their community, more likely to graduate high school, and more likely to have friends across racial or ethnic lines.

All of this to say: people reading poems, people practicing and admiring art, people engaging in acts of art, are more likely to be wise and tolerant citizens, fostering diverse community. The arts foster civic health. Artists are pollinators, too.

This Earth Month and National Poetry Month, I wonder if there can be a wider way to extend and build our spaces of patience, curiosity, attentiveness and care — in our own daily practices, our front yards, our morning meditations, our cities. How can we weave just a few more poems, a few more green spaces in?

I have often imagined riding through urban spaces, finding huge parking lots and putting up signs that read, “Why isn’t this a garden yet?” What if our cities were full of community gardens with free or low-cost arts programming in them? How might these spaces enrich us all as we face down the climate crisis, the empathy crisis, the hunger crisis, the loneliness crisis?

In some ways, such a world seems far off, but in other ways, it’s the kind of existence we have to dream aloud, to name, to make way for. We have to believe in these possible ecosystems of repair in order to work to widen them. It’s the kind of world I think my fellow gardeners imagine often, one my fellow poets help us dream up too. “I dwell in possibility” wrote Emily Dickinson. Gardens and poems invite that kind of dwelling. As spaces that embody richness, and point towards what might yet be, poems and gardens help us imagine the possible, a bit more richly, a bit more carefully, and (I imagine) more hopefully, as well.

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