black mustard: a poem

sharing a little poem today

Hello, dear readers and friends! How are you? How’s early autumn treating you?

I’m settling into my new apartment quite well, I think — I’m enjoying putting books and plants and art everywhere to make it feel like home. This is my first time living alone. It’s strange, but it’s lovely, and the more time I spend in my little home the more grateful I am for the space it is providing for new and old questions, hopes, and opportunities to surface and mingle within me.

The weather’s finally cooling off around here. We’ve had some mild days that don’t heat up past 75 degrees or so. Paired with some cool, cloudy mornings, windy afternoons, a marked change in the light (it’s longer and lower than summer sunlight, and in late afternoon the air glows with it), and a healthy dose of Ella Fitzgerald piano duets, I can feel a change begin. The year carefully drawing its way into something different. I can feel coziness slipping into my little life. It’s nice.

One of the first books I read for my MFA program was The Wild Iris, a quietly ravishing collection of poems by Louise Glück. It’s a collection I suspect will haunt me for . . . well, probably the rest of my life, if I’ll let it. Many of the poems are written from the perspective of plants and flowers — most of them apparently members of a garden, some of them wild in the world. They seem to be speaking to a gardener, or just humanity writ large. In others, the “I” seems to me to be a gardener speaking to God. I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered a collection that so aptly and precisely puts to language the beauty and devastation of living a life marked by a wound of loneliness.

I’m working on some poems modeled on hers for my next submission of creative pieces. The voices I’m seeking to encapsulate in my experiment are the voices of flora and fauna common to California, particularly southern California. I want to share one of them with you today, “Black Mustard.” (Those of you who follow me on Instagram will have already seen a slightly younger version of this piece.)

I would love to know how autumn is greeting you. If you’re willing, please do share and celebrate it in the comments on this post. I hope you are finding quiet spaces in your day to day life to settle in and “ripen” (as Rilke might put it) as this long, slow season gentles over you.

Black Mustard


You call me invasive 
but that is a name you gave me.
You label me unwanted. Invasive
species. How would you like such a name?

I make no objection to your efforts
to curb my presence, eradicate
me, but have you seen me growing
on the coastal hills 
in spring? 

I am
abundance. The only thing I know
to do is grow. I cover your hills
with swaying stalks of yellow – 
splash bright paint all over them – turn them 
to gold. 

How is it you can hate me 
when I have given you everything I know?