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This is a poem I ran across the other day, it reminded me of the time I spent in Kenya. The photo accompanying this poem is from that time in Kenya.

by Stanley Kunitz

All summer I heard them

rustling in the shrubbery,

outracing me from tier

to tier in my garden,

a whisper among the viburnums,

a signal flashed from the hedgerow,

a shadow pulsing

in the barberry thicket.

Now that the nights are chill

and the annuals spent,

I should have thought them gone,

in a torpor of blood

slipped to the nether world

before the sickle frost.

Not so. In the deceptive balm

of noon, as if defiant of the curse

that spoiled another garden,

these two appear on show

through a narrow slit

in the dense green brocade

of a north-country spruce,

dangling head-down, entwined

in a brazen love-knot.

I put out my hand and stroke

the fine, dry grit of their skins.

After all,

we are partners in this land,

co-signers of a covenant.

At my touch the wild

braid of creation

trembles.

Two filmmakers from Michigan State University are examining the emergence of urban agriculture as part of efforts to revive Flint. I am excited to see how this film develops. The boot camp style job training is an interesting approach getting kids attention. I am not sure this is the method I would chose to train my farm hands but we will have to see the results of this endeavor.

I sometimes try to Imagine if my neighborhood was decorated will native flora. A place where butterfly weed lured in the incects, trout lilly covered the ground and lawns covered in Kentucky bluegrass could only be seen in Kentucky. Thanks to Brandon Lingbeek and our awesome landlord Shahryar, we created a little bit of this dream.