Garden gargoyle, rumpled of brow, drowsy of eye, pointy of ear,
peeks at me as I work the earth while pink
primrose faces smile and nod | wink-wink | nod-wink,
their bashful appearance belying a rooted secret here.
I grasp and chop, fuming: they are anything but prim!
My castle of catmint and coreopsis, dianthus and delphinium,
under siege after invader arrived by Trojan horse of
busy bumbling bees | bird beaks dropping seeds. Moat
breached, land reached. My kingdom, for a spade! And then I recall
my gargoyle has magic and I drop my shears and shake
him awake and climb his ridged dragon back and we
take to the sky with a toss of his head as flames fall.
The pink-petaled invader left smote and smoking. Beyond,
lavender leaps toward the sun while delphinium dances and the roses sing.
Ann Kathryn Kelly lives and writes in New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing, and she works in the technology sector. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her essays have appeared in a number of literary journals. https://annkkelly.com/ Twitter & Instagram: @annkkelly