Thursday, September 28, 2006

Poetry Thursday - Seven of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting, after the long season of tending and growth,
the harvest comes.

Marge Piercy (Seven of Pentacles)

There is an original Thursday offering here.

6 comments:

Lené Gary said...

What a beautiful post--the words and your photograph. I really like the way the poet recreates each image, expanding it over and over again.

Anonymous said...

What a great piece by Marge Piercy. She lives on the Cape, you know [but I never met her].

Words to live by.

Unknown said...

Good morning Kerrdelune,
I took the time to really slow down and read this poem. The images are arresting and the message is profound: tend lovingly and look deeper than appearances.

Thank you for pulling this out. I'd forgetten that Marge Piercy write poetry. I remember a favorite one about a swimmer. Off I go to Google to find it.

Also, the link to you on my page is broken, and I can't seem to fix it. Nothing personal, just technical.

silverlight said...

Silver christyline beaded strung. in delicate design , upon a weaver's frame.
Beautiful pic of the spider's art.

Thomas said...

Rowan is a moon goddess making love that is loving! The nodes and houses and runs and burrows are real!

Thomas said...
This comment has been removed by the author.