This poem by Romanian born Carmen Bugan was included in Oxford Poets 2001, where I first came across it. It was also included in her collection Crossing the Carpathians.
It is a stark reminder – or lesson for those of us who have never had to face such dark days – of what it is like when just to be ordinarily alive is to be dangerous to suspicious authority.
Fertile Ground
I was pruning tomato plants when they came to search
for weapons in our garden;
they dug the earth under the chickens, bell peppers,
tiny melons, dill & horse radishes,
I cried over sliced egg plants
made one with the dirt,
over fresh dug earth & morning glories.
Their shovels uncovered bottles
with rusted metal caps – sunflower cooking oil
my father kept for ‘dark days’, purchased in days equally dark.
Their eyes lit – everyone got a bottle or two –
a promise for their families’ meals.
And when the oil spilled on the ground, shiny over crushed tomatoes
they asked me about weapons we might have kept.
‘Oil,’ I said: ‘You eat & live.
This alone makes one dangerous.’
