Gardener's Calloused Hands

Lyrics

They talk about the women's hands,
the dirt beneath the nails.
But I want to talk about your hands,
Sudbury.
The ones that never tire.

Your palms are the wide, slow water past Fairhaven Hill.
Your fingers are the little rivulets
that comb through the reeds.
You don't break the soil with a spade,
you unmake it,
you move it,
a handful of dark silt from here to there.
Patient.
You carry a seed for a mile on your back
and leave it in the soft mud of the floodplain.
A planting season that lasts a thousand years.

They call you Wild and Scenic.
Just another name for the way you work.
These are the gardener's calloused hands,
the patient, shifting, water-worn hands.
Tending a garden of what must be,
not what we decide.
A garden of Arrow Arum and Pickerelweed,
growing from a blueprint of current and ice.

You hide your rarest flowers in the muck.
Not for us.
The Slender Cottongrass, a secret you keep.
The River Birch, leaning in to hear you whisper.
You feed their roots with the memory of floods,
the mulch of last year's leaves.
No straight lines,
no tidy beds.
Just the sprawling, perfect chaos
of a thing that knows its own mind.

They call you Wild and Scenic.
Just another name for the way you work.
These are the gardener's calloused hands,
the patient, shifting, water-worn hands.
Tending a garden of what must be,
not what we decide.
A garden of Arrow Arum and Pickerelweed,
growing from a blueprint of current and ice.

We come with our trowels and our plans,
our seed packets from 1922.
We draw maps and build fences.
But you, you just flow.
You erase our edges.
You rearrange the stones.
Your work is older than the names we give the land,
older than the club, older than the town.

And your hands are still working.
Tonight.
Under the moon.
Pushing a grain of sand,
settling a lily pad.
The quietest work.
The most patient hands.