Poem: Trowel

This poem was written on the 19th June 2021, and contains a content warning for mention of pet death.

Trowel:

My mother taught me how to dig a grave with a trowel

and my bare hands, helped me lay to rest the dozen

fish, rats, and gerbils I got through from the age of

seven (I cried for every one). Our back garden was

a cemetery by the time I moved out. I find ritual in

burying the tiny body wrapped in kitchen roll every

time I lose another. I bought a trowel the first week

one of my rats started showing signs of his age, laid

a half-dozen of them to rest with it in the space of a

year. A year after that, I am digging in the community

garden behind my flat and when I have a hole deep

enough to stop the neighbourhood cats from digging

it up, I cast around for the tiny body wrapped in kitchen

roll, surprised when I find nothing but a strawberry

plant next to me. So practiced was the ritual of death

that I forgot that this time I practise only life. I pick up

the pot, roll it gently between my palms to loosen the

roots, ease the plant out by the base of the stalk. I

had forgotten that this, too, was a practiced process,

something my grandmother taught me. I lay it to rest

upright in the hole, fill the edges with soil again and

stamp it tight. I do not water it that day, something else

I read in a book once: it is hard enough for them that

their world goes from the cramped pot to the whole

open earth beneath them; do not overwhelm them with

an unexpected shower too. It is the same kindness,

really, to plant as to lay to rest. I consider apologising

to my trowel as I take it back upstairs, for not using it

for this purpose before now, but I do not. Whatever

goes into the earth, it is all the same to the trowel. It

is still a digging, still a scrabbling at soil, still a placing,

still a gentle practise. Still a ritual. The trowel knows

not whether it fertilises or unearths, buries or plants,

only that there is the same worship in the movement.