Pushcart 2026 L: Bruce Beasley, “Like Mowing the Grass” (poem) from The Hudson Review #76.4

LIKE MOWING THE GRASS The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. —Robert Frost, “Mowing” Fed up with my angel-ridden, Latinate dirges, my sophomore poetry professor kept telling me to write about something more ordinary and at hand, like mowing the grass. Instead of elegies for my mother who’d died suddenly a few months before, always mowing the grass was my prescription. He wanted it plainspoken, monosyllabic, backyardly. Certainly not the lines I’d been writing, like “lassitudes of opulent lamentation.” Note: Brace yourself: I’m about to do poetry, and if past experience is any indication, it’s not going to be pretty. Apologies to those who know and cherish poetic expression. One of the things poetry is particularly good at is using the mind’s ability to read words in multiple ways. This multiple imagery might result from multiple meanings of a word – ‘break’ can mean a rest, or destruction – or from association: a rose almost automatically implies romantic love, and the…