the prayer-like feeling
of patting dirt
I don’t usually deploy ellipses in haiku but in the first line here it has a kind of concrete-poetry effect, I think.
Extensive fiddling with the wording to keep from sounding too precious; not sure I succeeded. The decision to go with “dirt” rather than “soil” was pragmatic, though: I didn’t want too-hasty viewers to read it as “potting soil.”
