Faint, humming, inexorable in the damp
below the ruined walled castle garden
Mare’s Tail tunnels an eight-foot root.

Sly-boots, I’ve spaded the circle, reached to my elbow.
Still the plant breaks. As Eve brought a man
his labor, it will multiply tenfold.

I shop for survival: a sprayer to level pride, melancholy
and unwanted shoots. The canister is lowered from
its shelf, bagged in plastic. The till rings.

Keys in hand, I see the carpark as a horsetracked swale
where Cadfael leads his roan, saddlebagged
with an apothecary box. Medieval herbicide?

As he stumps through mud, the monk’s brass scale tips:
one pan sways with the bitterness of interrupted life,
the other, Eve’s radical helplessness.

TAB: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics (2018)