Single Poem Review: “After Scattering Ashes in August” by Emily Franklin
There are two words that make Emily Franklin’s poem “After Scattering Ashes in August” worth reading: “hope & errors.” Words brought together by an ampersand, binding them closer as if one could not exist without the other. The speaker is harvesting seeds after presumably scattering the ashes of her late grandmother, and is reflecting on the finite temporality of life, but also the unique ways in which life also regenerates life. The poet writes, “I am reminded / of my grandmother who with her knees in the dirt / told me gardening is the truest form of hope…”
“Shed no tear—Oh shed no tear! The flower would bloom another year!” Keats would exclaim. But this poem does more than use the trope of flowers as a cipher for human mortality. The grandmother “found hope and errors everywhere / which kept her present…” The word choice “error” is fascinating, because it implies more than common human mistakes. Errors emerge out of a malfunction or misconfiguration of a method or system—in this case, the system of life. When the grandmother found that animals “took up residence / in the driver’s seat of her car where sunflower seeds / had spilled,” she let it change up her daily routine to let the creatures nest in her car and “raise their young”—walking instead of driving until the animals eventually “left without warning.” The lesson here is that we can let “errors” gently reroute us, but also that one person’s spilled seeds can generate more life, just as flowers gone to seed will find use again in the dirt.
In a way, “After Scattering Ashes in August” reads like a small life cycle of its own—navigating the spaces of becoming and being, and making music with so many of life’s unsung gestures until the final (and single) end stop in the last line. The poem in its entirety is a run-on sentence of continuous thought. Punctuation is minimal, relying mainly on enjambment and a determined avoidance of end-stopped lines to create tension and a sense of constant movement. And just as there’s no guarantee of permanence in life, there’s no guarantee of permanence in a poem. Much like the speaker asking the dirt “to hold what I am taking and make it useful,” a poem lives as long as culture is willing to carry it.
🍾🍾🍾🔥🔥 (3 / 5 on the Toast or Roast scale)
Postscript:
There is a typo in the fourth stanza: …”because the animals—/ chipmunks, maybe—seemed so comfortable she allowed them run of them (sic) place…” I do not believe this was intended to be the poet’s literal depiction of “hope & errors”, and I presume the line will be revised in time.
Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of more than twenty novels and a poetry collection, “Tell Me How You Got Here.” Her award-winning work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, and numerous others as well as long-listed for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award, featured and read aloud on NPR, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries.
“After Scatting Ashes in August” was published in Cutleaf, a project of Eastover Press.
