Скачать или смотреть If by Julia Deakin

The Poetry Archive Now! WordView 2025 Entry

Poet’s Biography
Born in Nuneaton, I meandered north to Yorkshire via Staffordshire, Manchester and France. An established poet with four acclaimed collections, editing Pennine Platform magazine now leaves little time for my own work (or gardening), but what’s left is spent pruning my fifth. Any publishers out there?

Poem Description / Inspiration
Yes, gardens are good for you, but doing them is another matter. For every passionate gardener, many more find it a chore. Without time, money, skills and decent weather, nature will do its own thing. Garden centres are an industry. Velvet lawns are a monoculture. Live and let live is another approach. I mean, weeding? Really??

Poem Text
If cuckoo spit didn’t make you gyp
If you could still have fun with a hosepipe
If hard landscaping was easy
If growing tomatoes didn’t cost more than buying them in Aldi
If there was one thorn to every two roses
If you could clear cat crap without getting toxoplasmosis
If you could kill sawfly without poisoning the planet
If a terracotta pot was cheaper than a week in Crete
If slugs were Anglo-Saxon brooch pins
If your mower wasn’t haunted by the ghost of Philip Larkin
If you hadn’t failed the hedgehog adoption test
If bug hotels weren’t full of pests
If there was a recipe for three gooseberries
If knees were what they used to be
If you could fill a balcony with containers and it not collapse
If decking wasn’t Glasto for rats
If you hadn’t cut yourself combing through long grass for that nut off the back of the shears
If the seasons were as orderly as The Très Riches Heures
If war on Japanese knotweed and Spanish bluebells didn’t smack of ethnic cleansing
If wisdom wasn’t dispensed by an ex-jeweller from a demesne the size of Shropshire
If wasps made honey
If standing on a rake was funny
If leylandii would bonsai themselves
If putrid potatoes didn’t turn up everywhere forevermore
If a doctor lived next door
then gardening could be good for your health.