Risa Bear’s “Some Things Will” opens with a paradox: “In a garden’s grave, life remains.” The garden is a place of burial and survival at once, and the poem’s work is to uncover how much life still stirs among dead vines and cold soil. The speaker gathers beets that were never pulled, takes greens to dehydrate or leaves them for the goose, finds tomatoes by their red highlights, and pulls beans from “dense thickets of dead vines.” Even the weeds that once “defeated her” now offer “rich heads of seed for hens.” The phrase “to boil / And put back” is especially telling: what is taken from the soil is cooked and then returned for the flock, so the kitchen becomes part of the garden’s cycle too. The central idea is not simply that a garden can be salvaged, but that neglect and decay are not the opposite of abundance—they belong to the same process.
The poem is written in free verse, with no regular rhyme or meter. Its rhythm is conversational, shaped by enjambment that often isolates a word of change or surprise. “Never pulled may be pulled now” balances two passive forms in a single line, turning failure into possibility. Elsewhere, line breaks create small shifts of attention: “scanning / Ground for spuds” drops the eye downward just as the speaker searches the earth, and the phrase “Rarely, rewardingly” slows the reader before the promise of a ripe winter squash. The language leans on verbs of giving and rising: dead vines “give” beans, weeds “yield” seed, chard and kale “erupt.” These verbs make the garden an active partner rather than a passive plot of land.
Imagery moves between waste and plenty. The “garden’s grave” is not empty; it holds red tomatoes missed at harvest and “viable chard and kale” that emerge as if it were March. The word “viable” suggests the garden’s future is already stored inside the decaying present. The speaker also notices what the hens have done: their feet roll out potatoes, as if the animals are doing their own gleaning. The poem pays attention to small rewards—a squash, a few beans, seed heads for hens—rather than a grand harvest. Later, the scale widens. Little remains of the apple crop in the orchard, yet the early varieties have filled the cellar and kitchen cabinet with sealed jars. Abundance, it seems, has already been put away. Then the Granny Smiths appear as “a / Mighty wall,” ripening late and asking pardon for their tardiness. The line break after “a” makes the wall of green fruit arrive as a visual surprise, and the personification is both comic and tender.
The speaker does not pick those apples. Her arms ache, and the poem states plainly, “In winter one wants rest.” That short, end-stopped line is the emotional pivot. The poem does not scold her for leaving food; it treats rest as a legitimate response to the season. What makes “Some Things Will” significant is its refusal to make labor endless or to equate worth only with full use. The garden survived without perfect care, and some of its gifts can wait. The title is a dangling clause completed only by the final line, “Some things will wait for Spring.” The poem ends not with certainty but with hope, placed in “her hands” rather than in abstract ambition. That quiet, limited hope—some things, not everything—feels earned, because the whole poem has been an exercise in noticing what remains.