The Door-to-Door Saleswoman

Look, I’m knocking on your door,
satchel full of flyers for the best subscription
I can offer you—deals for a scholarship
to the school of the world, jars of honey, 
honeysuckle’s perfume, the sky swept
cirrus by big bluestem, the zigzag work
of bees, the four directions of the compass 
signaled by the compass plant, sunflowers’
fix on east, a wind to make a chime 
of leaf stir and branch when ice shackles
the prairie grass—look at its brilliance
flashing as it drips! 
                                   And maybe this 
is a return to my girlhood work,
knocking on neighbors’ doors with deals
for Time and Life subscriptions, scholarship
to the college of my choice, in a town where
Uranium-235 was carefully sorted from U-238
to make the bombs that could blow up our world—
this wish to spend life tending what grows.

Copyright © 2021 by Robin Chapman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 22, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I was working on a manuscript of poems celebrating our Wisconsin prairies and our Eagle Heights community garden, where we raise rhubarb and kale and butternut squash, and my reader said: yes, but why do you care? Which took me aback—and then back to memories of my childhood home in the Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, my efforts to earn money for college, and the explanation I discovered in writing this poem.”
—Robin Chapman