Sour and sting of early spring,
I seek flavors biting and harsh,
gather to my kitchen rose rhubarb,
its green-tart sensation transformed
to mellowed elation when joined
with West Virginia honey, egg, flour, oats.
This season I turn toward eastern hillsides,
pulling slender pips from their leaf-littered beds.
Ramson, I could love you for ritual alone.
The hunt, the dig. Such pungent parcel,
washed of grit and humus clung to roots,
marries garlic-streak into flesh of roast beef.
Radishes I relish most for color,
jackets spring-pink lush, and magenta-red,
white heat hidden inside such plucky cheek.
Could I live without spring flavors?
--Bite into summer’s garden rush?
----Sink teeth into autumn’s dependable starch?
------Pull the stored seasons from winter’s cold box?
Here again the earth has shifted.
Spring slips in its sweet-sour punch,
late snow dusting the redbud in full bloom.
Though edible, the legume’s buds,
more beauty than bite.
Bio: Poet, local foods enthusiast, & mostly retired farmer Susan Truxell Sauter calls Preston County, WV, home. Susan left a journalism career to farm organically in the late 1990s, helping start the WV Farmer’s Market Association, a WV Buy Fresh-Buy Local campaign, & organizing the Morgantown Farmer’s Market. Her poems appear in the Apalachee Review (FL), Anthology of Appalachian Writers; Women of Appalachia Project: Women Speak, Volumes. 3, 5 & 10th Anniversary Collection; Nasty Women & Bad Hombres (Pittsburgh); Fracture: Essays, Poems, & Stories on Fracking in America (Ice Cube Press—Iowa); and Voices from the Attic (Carlow University), Volumes. 21, 23, 24, 25. The Allegheny Front, an environmental radio program, twice featured her work. She holds a B.A. in Communications from Ohio State University.