Garden of Life

All my imagination comes from this place. This air, this light, the ditch flowers along the tracks of Girdwood Crescent where the freight trains rattle the houses, and where they still rattle in my bones.

I’m thinking about poetry and physical labour and what it means to know a place from the inside.

In 2023 I worked as a general labourer in the Assiniboine Park English Gardens.

When I return to the garden I'm filled with a sense of belonging that surprises me. I will wave like mad at a gardener in a blue shirt and tilley hat who doesn't know me, because I want to tell her I know this place and we share the work.

And how beautiful it is to know a place from the inside. With others.

In the garden I work where a poet loves to work, just below the conversation, where you can hear everything.

—Jennifer Still, Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts, June 5, 2025

Assiniboine Park, Treaty One, Winnipeg

We work on our hands and knees.
We work below Lungwort. Forget-me-Nots. Bleeding Heart.

We work with thick-gloved palms that extend past our wrists.

People pass by holding their hearts.

Thank you they say. Thank you.

There's a pulse in our hands.
An organ with eyes and a neck and a crown.
The bulb has strings and stores and when we place
her in the earth people walk by with hands on their hearts.

They speak about what's late.
They speak about what's early.
They speak about what doesn't return.

We work through the stages of dawn. Civil. Nautical. Twilight.
Our gloves wait for us, palm-up, at the window.

There's no substitute for hands that want to do the work.

We learn to reach out from our centers.

We learn the flowers represent transplants. Kidneys, hearts, lungs. What is offered and what is received.

When we plant we feel it high in our chests, low in our throats.

When we plant we call the garden her.

A hummingbird lifts out of a purple flute.

A dog named Polly lies beside us. “She feels you," her owner says. "She’s getting slower and slower. She's my wound.”

We take 3 sad water lilies to the greenhouse. Will light be enough?

A low glow hovers under a cedar. People do it all the time. Offer an urn.

We say her and dig our hole.

We say her and mow a path.

We say her and hold to the shimmer in the grass and when the light changes
we hold to something else.

Sometimes the light comes too fast and we are not ready.
Sometimes a sparrow in the hedge is a passing figure.

The garden is a space in the air we grow into, 4-feet above the earth. A clear path at chest-height where the lily meets the spark.

The garden is what has left and what will return, how we listen to the flower and with which part of ourselves we track the light and what we lean to when we lose the shimmer and where we reach from when we lower the bulb and who we remember and what we offer when the low note lights in our throats.

The garden is what we hear when we work close to the earth. The garden is a response to the conditions. What if our blights and our pain are a response to our conditions?

What if we change the conditions?

Jennifer Still, Poet Laureate
May 2025