She steadies the weight of corrugated iron
above the compost heap with upraised arm.
Her solid-limbed body – shapeless
in wedge-heeled shoes and grey shift dress.
Puts out tulips like the dying embers
of a wood-fire in suburbia;
adding to flower-cemetery’s final remains
the yellow iris, freesias and chrysanthemums;
seasons told by flower-stem
and stages of decomposition;
their brittle crisp-curled petals lace
the growing debris of domestic waste.
A daily ritual witnessed by a shock-limbed tree
that stands forever barren beside a thriving nursery.
“The Garden of Remembrance was something I wrote for my M.A. in Creative Writing & Personal Development inspired by ‘The Dustbin, Cookham’ – a painting by Stanley Spencer. In this poem, flowers are a place-holder for the beauty and colour of dreamed-of infants – dreams that fade and die, and have to be regularly replaced, making a compost heap a cemetery of lost dreams, ironically next to a thriving nursery – playing on the ‘loaded’ word ‘nursery’. The attempt to numb grief becomes a daily routine – in both cases. “
Award-winning poet, Janina Aza Karpinska, achieved an M.A. Creative Writing & Personal Development (with Merit) at Sussex University. Writing in many styles is a daily practice, with work published in: Three Drops From A Cauldron; Ekphrastic Review; Isacoustic, Willawaw Journal, Drawn to the Light, and Poems in the Waiting Room among others.