Read the poem ‘My Father’s Garden Tools’ by Dennis Camire

This week’s poem, Dennis Camire’s “My Father’s Garden Tools,” is a moving meditation on mortality and the enduring, ever-cycling solace of gardening. I love this poem’s rich bounty of pole pruners, saws and fertilizer recipes, and its warm, expansive wisdom about how our loved ones can live on well beyond their season.

Camire’s most recent book is “Anthology of Awe and Wonder” (Deerbrook Editions). He teaches and tutors writing at Central Maine Community College. The former director of Maine Poetry Central and the founder of The Portland Poet Laureate Program, his work has appeared in The Mid-American Review, Poetry East, Spoon River Review, and elsewhere. He is also the “spokes-poet” for the mom-and-pop owned company Soil Foods, which farms worms for worm castings.

My Father’s Garden Tools

Gifting me a few tools each visit
that are useless with his bad hips
and macular degenerative eyes

the trowel and gravel rake I inherit
reveal how close he feels to being
sown, like a beet seed, into the ground;

though I poke my head into the shed’s
one-room schoolhouse of tools then
dodge gloom of his imminent death

in espying the polished flower snips
still hanging over his worn work bench.
Still, I know when possessing his pole pruner

Or bulb planter, that he’ll be so close
to being nothing but compost and a soul
skinny dipping the hierarchies’ liquid light.

But grieving, then, my own shed will be
a solace-sanctuary where the dangling
weeding hoe will farm memories

of him growing our affections
as he waxed poetic on good insects
or secreted his fertilizer recipe

for sweet corn where white perch
in the compost rockets the stalks
into a fireworks of cobs popping.

And even when I’ll think of our
political arguments in the garage,
that antique pruning saw will fruit

sweet recollections of us potting
our grafted apple saplings whose trunks
and scions we perfectly fused

opened me to the beauty in healing
broken things from unlike species.
Let grief, then, sprout the wild thistle

Alongside her invasive Japanese beetles
for, each future summer, these tools
will be heavy with his affections

so, just edging the garden’s north side,
will keep his turnip heart thriving
alongside the other unseen,

sweetening burgeoning root veggies;
and, even in fall, with his backhoe
turning over the dead kale and frost-

damaged squash, it’ll be impossible
to put his affection’s garden to bed
as my father’s love can forever be farmed

no matter how dry, frozen or alkaline
the ground that will move even as I hold
the rusted watering wand’s winter cold.

– Dennis Camire

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “My Father’s Garden Tools,” ©2026 by Dennis Camire, appears by permission of the author.

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