This is Poetry Moment on WPSU, a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
By the beginning of March, many of us are yearning for spring. Will March come in like a lion or a lamb? By the time this episode airs, we’ll know. In today’s poem, “Dirt,” Jayne Brown takes us to that space where one season transitions to another, where “warm rain fall[s] on last Wednesday’s snow.” As we know in Pennsylvania, this transition can take a few weeks — or a few hours.
Jayne Brown is the author of "My First Real Tree," a book of poems from Foothills Press, and "The Third Remembrance," a chapbook with Finishing Line Press coming out in 2026. Her poems have appeared recently in Calyx, Passager, and the Crone Edition of Gyroscope Review. She was the eighth Poet Laureate of Berks County, Pennsylvania, and taught writing at Penn State Berks until retiring in 2018.
Today’s poem is a tribute to dirt: what we sow beneath its surface, what it offers up in return. According to Jayne Brown, dirt connects us to memory, and thus to different seasonal experiences. She adds, “‘Dirt’ was written “soon after I moved to Pennsylvania from growing up in Southern California…. I was (and still am) in love with the rhythms of Pennsylvania’s four seasons.”
Here’s “Dirt” by Jayne Brown.
Dirt
-Village of Dryville, Berks County
Dirt gives, opens to my finger,
lets my little furrow fill
with butterhead and sugarpod,
Detroit Red and Bull’s Blood beets.
Dirt lets last year’s leeks emerge
and suffer me their shoots
chopped up for soups, brings
baby green just lightly dressed
and bitten, tendril down to root.
The smell of dirt can take me back
to trips through woods
where blood-root rose,
unrolling root-balls, yanking
tangled hostas into smaller knots.
Too much to plant’s the kind of rich I want—
the celebrations of forsythia,
and building whole new beds
on top of table-scraps and news.
Today is gray—wet window screens,
a six-foot mist, the shock from warm rain
falling on last Wednesday’s snow,
but sloshing through the rivers trickling
in the shoveled paths to empty trash,
to feed the outdoor cats, and dump
the compost in its steaming bin,
a loosening beginning underneath my feet
lets me remember dirt, and what dirt gives.
“Dirt” recently appeared in "Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania," edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025).
That was “Dirt” by Jayne Brown. Thanks for listening.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
