Jehanne Dubrow

Contest - Prose Poem

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three books of nonfiction, ten poetry collections, and most recently, a craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma (University of New Mexico Press, 2025). Her fourth book of creative nonfiction, Frivolity: A Defense, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals, including New England Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. She is a Distinguished Research Professor and a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.

 

Creeping Thyme

In the garden, my husband plants small pots of creeping thyme, their tendrils like fingers reaching. He delineates the ground with orange rocks. A focal point, he says—because we have started only with a fence, the bareness of dirt, a few flowers from the field that used to be there. Sometimes, watching him dig, I recall a story about mass graves in the east, how the bodies were pushed in, and villagers said the earth moved for three days. What I mean is: no place is entirely empty. Even dry soil can hold the stamp of a hand. Even the grass remembers the weight of our passage.

“ ‘Creeping Thyme’ comes from my current manuscript-in-progress, We Must Cultivate Our Garden. The title of this collection is a translation of the final sentence in Voltaire’s Candide, ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ The poems in my book are trying to make sense of what we should do in response to trauma and catastrophe, the different forms of tyranny that press increasingly in on us, depriving us of safety and comfort even within the private spaces of our lives. Is Voltaire right? Should we respond to devastation and loss by cultivating our own gardens? And can the garden—the prelapsarian—ever be fully recovered?   ”