2nd Prize – 2025
The Language My Grandmother Spoke to the Earth – Deborah Miller
She never named it prayer
just bent her spine toward the soil
like a question only loam could answer.
Fingers furrowed rows of silence
into black earth behind the cottage,
her voice low as mist,
speaking in syllables the wind still holds.
I watched the rain pause for her,
listened as stones softened
beneath her vowels.
Not English, not even Welsh
but something older,
a dialect of roots and bone.
She sang water into parched furrows,
whispered lullabies to dying herbs,
and the garden obeyed.
My grandmother never wrote poems
but I saw her script in dandelion scatter,
heard her stanzas in the hush
between crowcall and dusk.
She taught me that soil remembers touch,
that seeds trust only certain hands.
Not everyone is born fluent
in the grammar of growing.
She was.
She spoke moss into crevices,
persuaded Ivy to spare the eaves.
When I cried at the world’s indifference,
she handed me marrowfat peas
and said: plant your grief.
The ground knows what to do with sorrow.
I did.
And in spring, forgiveness rose
in quiet green tongues.
Now I walk barefoot
where she used to kneel,
ears tuned to the hush beneath bramble,
to the roots telling secrets in sleep.
I speak less these days.
I listen more.
And sometimes,
when dusk presses its breath against the hedgerow,
I catch the echo
not of words,
but meaning.
The earth still answers to her voice.
And through me,
perhaps it learns the sound
of her once more.