Split Ends

Holding what is fraying

Welcome to a new feature: starting this month, each paid subscription will bring you one poem, alongside my regular free monthly articles. Split Ends is the first poem in this series—a reflection on change, growth, and the small rituals that anchor us through life’s transitions.

This past August, while overseeing a few garden design projects, I also worked part-time at Share the Harvest, a 6-acre farm growing nutritious, organic produce—and plenty of flowers—for local food pantries and other charitable organizations on the East End of Long Island. I wore my hair in braids, letting the rhythm of plaiting and the work of my hands in the soil mark the passage of time. Planting, weeding, and tending the land became a quiet apprenticeship in patience and presence—lessons I carry not only into grad school (which begins today) but into all the shifts life brings.

This poem is an homage to that practice: to the rituals that root us, the soil that shapes us, and the tender, enduring work of holding what’s fraying until it binds again.

Split Ends

I work with my hair in braids—

roots and rivers crossing under my hands.

In each turn of the plait

my grandmother’s wind-scold

tidies the loose hairs,

my mother’s sun-voice

lays a palm on my cheek,

and somewhere inside the marrow

I tell myself:

Be kind. 

Some ends split like seed husks.

Some silver as frost.

Most are dark, 

heavy as wet soil.