The Poet as a Young Man

My mother was a gardener, although technically she still is, as much as life in assisted living will allow. On fall days when the sun came down through the maple leaves like stained glass and the dirt side walks were carpeted with soft pine needles, the neighbors would fill the air with the delightful smell of marshmallow roasting bonfires at the edge of the street. That happened at every house but ours, where we obediently stuffed all the fallen vegetation into bags, and dragged them out to the compost pile, where, as my mother instructed us, they would be turned into dirt.
In the spring my parents would go to the hardware or garden supply store and return with bags of peat moss to build up the beach sand which constituted the dirt around our house. The old leaves would be spread on the flower beds, and one year when, for some inexplicable reason, the Memorial Day parade wound its way through the residential streets of town instead of down Maine St. (Yes it was spelled Maine and not Main: Our town boasted the widest Maine St. in the country. Originally laid out by the first settlers, it was called “Twelve Rod Road” referring to its width. Our father’s found that if the road were cleared back to that width, travelers would be out of range of the natives’ bows and arrows, but, again, I digress) When the parade had passed, my mother ordered me to go out into the street with a shovel and pick up the horse manure left behind. Not wishing to be the laughing stock of Longfellow School the next day, I refused, and so, she took the wheel barrow and did it herself.
Along with the lime, and fertilizer was always a bag of a product called “Bovung,” or dried cow manure. We had been around farms a bit, and so I was aware of manure piles, like the one that allegedly kept Shubel Merriman’s barn from toppling over, but I was fascinated by the fact that someone had come up with the idea of colorfully packaging colonic droppings of a ruminant. So intrigued was I that, at the age of 13, I composed a poem about it, which recently came to light in some old boxes.
And so, dear reader, I present to you for the first time in 50 years:
Ode to a Horse Bun
There you lie, regal horse bun,
Product of what some steed has done.
Some, for their gardens, for you will pay,
Mixture of oats, and grass, and hay.
Art some quadruped has wrought,
In colored ten pound bags is bought.
Shoveled from hill and vale and field,
Pasteurized, shredded, packaged and peeled.
Fertilizing, as any turd should,
Horse bun—you never had it so good!