You think you know the sprouts
in the garden of your life:
which are the heirloom vegetables
and which the cursed weeds.
You tromp through,
plucking all sorts of green things
from the seedbed of certainty.
I have seen impatient people
yank the loveliest of herbs
because they thought they knew.
But you don’t know.
You don’t know what nameless weeds
will bless and blossom,
bear unimagined fruit,
even among their thorns,
in a harvest beyond your reckoning.
You do not know whose weedy life
is, in the other world,
burgeoning with God’s glory.
Do not judge.
You are not the Gardener.
The fruits of heaven grow
on the shabbiest stalks.
Only later will you see the work
of the One Who Sows,
the One Who Gathers.