Thursday Poem - At the road's turning, a sign

Stranger, you have reached a fabulous land―
in winter, the abode of swans,
magnolia buds and black leaves

secretly feeding the earth―
memory snaked into tree roots.

In spring, you will feel life changes
bubble up in your blood like early wine,
and your heart will be lighter than
the flight of gossamer pollen.

Stranger, in summer, you will drink deeply
of a curious local wine,
fortified with herbs cut with a silver knife
when the moon was new.
Who knows what freedoms
will dazzle your path like fireflies?

And I promise you, in the fall
you will give up the search and know peace
in the fragrance of apple wood burning.
You will learn how to accept love
in all its masks, and the universe
will sing here more sweetly than any other place

Dolores Stewart, from The Nature of Things
(February,1931 - May, 2017)

My friend was a wonderful storyteller and a fine poet. It is hard to believe it has been eight years since she left us and went on ahead.

Thursday Poem - September Mosaic

Before we come with rakes and crackling

energy to clean it up,

the backyard is precisely

as the dog prefers it -- left alone,

a natural selection

of leaf, stick, bone, pod, seed, and stone.

But we are cosmic instruments

of music and disturbance, only

animals by half,

and will not let the season bleed

its shifting earth designs

of stone, bone, leaf, stick, pod, and seed.

Some earthscapes rearranged

are gardens, or hillsides

shorn to make a path for wired poles

or graveyards stiff with grief

or clearcut forests. Let me take care

of seed, stone, pod, bone, stick, and leaf.

Let me recall the universe

is breathing in my breath, it plays

its tune in me, it dreams my being --

an unnamed, unrecorded god

becoming conscious as I am

of leaf, seed, stick, stone, bone, and pod.

I am a painting made of sand and pollen.

Structure and spirit

are my codes. Nothing of life

is random or a trick

I draw myself a part of all

with pod, leaf, bone, seed, stone, and stick

The circle of the seasons turns

and never comes back quite the same.

Fertile impulses in time

will overgrow the patterns I have sown,

return to animal wilderness

of stick, pod, stone, leaf, seed and bone.

Let me be glad

new seasons bud from stick and leaf,

new forces split a pod and spill the seed,

new rhythms rise from stone and bone.

Dolores Stewart, Doors to the Universe
She was my friend, and I miss her.

Thursday Poem - To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes

almost out of sight. They seem

to become natives of that

element, the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves,

an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like

water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck

to move things forward, who do what

has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field

deserters but move in a common

rhythm when the food must come

in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles

to dust. But the thing worth doing

well done has a shape that satisfies,

clean and evident. Greek amphoras

for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn,

are put in museums but you know

they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy from Circles on the Water

Thursday Poem - Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep

a sound when autumn comes. Yellow

pulls across the hills and thrums,

or the silence after lightening before it

says its names—and then the clouds'

wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed

from birth: you will never be alone.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,

long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound,

moss on rock, and years. You turn your head—

that’s what the silence meant: you’re not

alone. The whole wide world pours down.

William Stafford, (from The Way It Is)

For my brother James Brendan Franklin
(March 10, 1960 - August 22, 2023

Thursday Poem - From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned

toward signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside,

succulent peaches we devour,

dusty skin and all, comes the familiar

dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite

into the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom

to impossible blossom, to sweet

impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee

Thursday Poem - This

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,

Left to us.

No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory

With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.

No meaning but what we find here.

No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved's clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.

Gregory Orr

(from How Beautiful the Beloved)

Thursday Poem - At Dawn

At dawn this morning, a waning moon

floating high in the cloudless blue,

graces a perfect summer day, one

that will never come again in all its

sweetness and its fey perfume.

Slow walkers in the early hours, we go along

together, paw and paw, through fragrant

yieldings of chicory, clover and daisies,

attended on our rambles by rhyming crickets,

by humming bees and dancing leaves.

While around us, unseen but deeply felt

and loved, the world is breathing softly

in and out, many voices falling together

into seamless light and tune and time.

Cate (me)

Thursday Poem - How the Trees on Summer Nights

How the trees on summer nights turn into

a dark river, how you can never reach it,
no matter how hard you try, walking as fast
as you can, but getting nowhere, arms and
legs pumping, sweat drizzling in rivulets;
each year, a little slower, more creaks
and aches, less breath. Ah, but these soft
nights, air like a warm bath, the dusky wings
of bats careening crazily overhead, and
you’d think the road goes on forever.
Apollinaire wrote, “What isn’t given to love
is so much wasted,” and I wonder what
I haven’t given yet. A thin comma moon
rises orange, a skinny slice of melon, so
delicious I could drown in its sweetness.
Or eat the whole thing, down to the rind.
Always, this hunger for more.

Barbara Crooker, (from More)

Thursday Poem - Become Becoming

Wait for evening.

Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.

Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes

and pretended to be invisible.

The one to whom you told every secret.

The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence

while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror? A flowering tree?

Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue

(the color of your homesickness).

Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that color of Amen).

Then you'll spy the wind's barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning

with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing

shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face

is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands

are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered

to the names your mother and father gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.

Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life

as a book of candles,

each page read by the light of its own burning.

Li-Young Lee

(from Behind My Eyes)

Thursday Poem - Epiphany

Lynn Schmidt says

        she saw You once as prairie grass,

        Nebraska prairie grass,

she climbed out of her car on a hot highway,

leaned her butt on the nose of her car,

looked out over one great flowing field,

stretching beyond her sight until the horizon came:

vastness, she says,

responsive to the slightest shift of wind,

        full of infinite change,

        all One.

She says when she can't pray

She calls up Prairie Grass.

Pem Kremer

Thursday Poem - Aunt Leaf

Needing one, I invented her—
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,
and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we'd travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker—
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish—and all day we'd travel.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she'd slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she'd hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

Mary Oliver, from Twelve Moons

Thursday Poem - Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands grow distant

in your sight, one journeying to heaven

and one that falls;

and leave you not at home in either one,

not quite so still and dark as the darkened

houses, not calling to eternity with

the passion of what becomes a star

each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

your life, with its immensity and fear,

so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Thursday Poem - Directions (Excerpt)

The best time is late afternoon

when the sun strobes through

the columns of trees as you are hiking up,

and when you find an agreeable rock

to sit on, you will be able to see

the light pouring down into the woods

and breaking into the shapes and tones

of things and you will hear nothing

but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy

falling of a cone or nut through the trees,

and if this is your day you might even

spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese

driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things

how the voices of light enter the body

and begin to recite their stories

how the earth holds us painfully against

its breast made of humus and brambles

how we who will soon be gone regard

the entities that continue to return

greener than ever, spring water flowing

through a meadow and the shadows of clouds

passing over the hills and the ground

where we stand in the tremble of thought

taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins, 

(from The Art of Drowning)

Thursday Poem - To the Rain

Mother rain, manifold, measureless,

falling on fallow, on field and forest,

on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,

downwelling waters all-washing, wider

than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster

than countrysides, calming, recalling:

return to us, teaching our troubled

souls in your ceaseless descent

to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,

to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the seas.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from So Far So Good

Thursday Poem - The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too

were born to be.

Mary Oliver

Thursday Poem - May

May, and among the miles of leafing,
blossoms storm out of the darkness—
windflowers and moccasin flowers. The bees

dive into them and I too, to gather

their spiritual honey. Mute and meek,

yet theirs is the deepest certainty that

this existence too—this sense of

well-being, the flourishing of the

physical body—rides near the hub

of the miracle that everything 
is a part of, is as good as a poem

or a prayer, can also make luminous

any dark place on earth.

Mary Oliver

Thank you to my friend Frances at Beautiful Strangers for reacquainting me with Mary's exquisite poem.

Thursday Poem - When I Am Wise

When I am wise in the speech of grass,

I forget the sound of words

and walk into the bottomland

and lie with my head on the ground

and listen to what grass tells me

about small places for wind to sing,

about the labor of insects,

about shadows dank with spice,

and the friendliness of weeds.

When I am wise in the dance of grass,

I forget the name and run

into the rippling bottomland

and lean against the silence which flows

out of the crumpled mountains

and rises through slick blades, pods,

wheat stems, and curly shoots,

and is carried by wind for miles

from my outstretched hands.

Mary Gray from Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World

Thursday Poem - For the Children

The rising hills,
the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together,
learn the flowers,
go light.

Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

Thursday Poem - Come to Dust

Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body
that are to come, the motions
of the matter that held you.

Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.
Fall to the earth in the falling rain.
Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.
Mount slowly in the rising sap
to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.
Come down to earth as leaves in autumn
to lie in the patient rot of winter.
Rise again in spring’s green fountains.
Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen
to fall in blessing.
                        All earth’s dust
has been life, held soul, is holy.

Ursula K. Leguin

Thursday Poem - Swiftly

Swiftly the years, beyond recall,

Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.

I will clothe myself in spring clothing,

And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.

By the mountain stream a mist hovers,

Hovers a moment, then scatters.

There comes a wind blowing from the south

That brushes the fields of new corn.

T'ao Ch'ien (translation by Arthur Waley)

Reginald H. Blyth thought T'ao Ch'ien's creation was the finest poem ever written. We are still several weeks away from seeing new corn, but for me, the eight lines are the essence of April and springtime.