In the Garden
By Dan Hardison
photograph

Promise of the Garden
By George W. Jones

The garden has been a dormant thing
through weary winter, dull and drab,
and full of shrouds of burlap and straw
entombing plants against the frost.

Now in mid Lent, the Garden is gaunt.
It appears as though it had kept a strict fast,
as though its beauty is heavily veiled
for Passion Tide.

Today the soil is cold,
the wind sharp, the sun pale,
and yet one cannot enter the garden
and fail to feel a push
and a throb in the soil –
pregnant with promise of spring.

When Easter comes to the Garden,
a thousand entombed plants
will be bursting forward and upward
into resurrection.