This week’s poem, by Thomas Moore of Brooksville, consists of just one sentence with a surprise ending. The poem relates a story of Moore’s grandmother, who taught him gardening and, as he puts it, “how to get through a tough time.”

Her Telling

By Thomas R. Moore

When she told me

after she’d uncoiled the line

    with the steel stakes at the ends

    to set straight rows of peas

    clad in her denim cover-alls

    and tall rubber boots at seventy,

after she’d tossed garden stones

    onto the long windrow

    beyond the asparagus,

after she’d showed me

    the ants climbing the peony stalks

    to the hard buds and cupped hands

    beside the kitchen propane tanks,

and even after years of stirring

    green tomato mincemeat

    on the yellow Glenwood

    and tugging carrots

    from the hot August soil

    and snapping off ears of corn

    and letting me pick clean

    the tree of seckel pears-

    the hard tangy red fruit-

    in October,

even forty years after that Christmas day

    when she smashed the third floor door,

    the children listening below,

    to find her husband inside,

    dead by his own hand,

my grandmother was stunned

by her own telling.