Caroline Misner

The Bean Picker

These stringy vines have lassoed the trellises,

tightened their cords and knotted around the chicken

wire cages in a sort of strangulation.

But I’m glad I got here when I did,

while the dew still beads the curled leaves with undersides

of barbs that prickle and hook my skin.

I can move easily among them, spelunking the green

caverns of the vegetable patch where prize

tomatoes await their blush, herbs extend their scented

foliage, stiff as bamboo, and I ponder the great

improbability of these stalks growing from seed.

The beans themselves are no challenge to me,

though they resemble the cockeyed vines and sometimes

tend to be hard to find. The bees hover between

the flopping leaf-tongues. A spider has constructed

a thin web between the spout and handle of the watering

can and abandoned it. The sleek pods plop into a tin

pot of water between my feet. Already an insect is drowning

in it—little valiant one who only came to graze in

the garden, whose appetite punched holes in the leaves

and scalloped their edges like an old photograph.

Six small legs wriggle in one final death spasm, mandibles

snapping, wings singing his last number.

Like the beans, he’s not ready to go.

Continue...

Greetings one and all and welcome to my brand new website! Please bear with me portrait

I work on filling its pages with news and musings. Being technologically challenged, it may take a while to work out some of the glitches and I hope to have it finished within the next few weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to browse through the archives and have a look at some of my work. I've been writing poetry ever since I could remember and I've decided to include a section of Juvenilia in the archives. Most of the poems listed there were written in my early teens and many of them are just plain awful! But a few gems do stand out and I hope you enjoy them. Also, if you would like to know more about me and the work I do, please feel free to click on "About". There I have posted a brief biography of myself. I'm not trying to be falsely modest, but I really loathe bragging about myself. I feel an author's work should stand on its own merits and where an author was born or where she lives or what she eats for breakfast are completely irrelevant.

I would also be remiss if I didn't included a big Thank You! to my oldest son, Kevin, who with a friend designed this website for me and programmed it so that even I could manage it. And another big Thank You! goes to my dear father Jan Kurz, who was in on it the whole time and provided the stunning photography behind the text of the daily poem. And another big Thank You! goes out to all the editors, publishers and fellow writers who have supported me and my work over the years and gave me a chance when I needed it, including a Journey Prize nomination and two Pushcart Prize nominations!

"...And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt."
--Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)