Grandmother taught me what to watch for:
curling blue leaves growing opposite each other.

Every year, she threw a handful of seeds in the soil,
and now I do, too. She taught me

what to watch for: cooler mornings,
something called frost, the shores receding back

to the line they’d crossed when she was a little girl.
Something she’d called seasons, and how they change.

Eyes open for the undoing of man-made
destruction, the reclamation of earth-healing.

I could never look away from grandmother’s hope;
now, I stare at the soil when I’ve thrown her seeds,

awaiting another time, another place
where we could live and grow and love in safety.

Tiny emerald green leaves burst through
as my granddaughter kneels in the dirt

wearing a holy denim jacket and hand-me-down
grin I’d nearly forgotten the look of.

She is here for this. She is here.

© 2026 Jordan Hirsch