Category: Flowers

An Acceptance of Decline

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In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks
passing southward over the valley. The tall
sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks
to cold seed, by the still river. And high
up the birds rose into sight against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.
~Wendell Berry “September 2”

And when I rise, let me rise
Like a bird, joyfully.
And when I fall, let me fall,
Like a leaf, gracefully, without regret.
And when I stand, let me stand,
Like a tree, strong and tall.
And when I lie, let me lie,
Like a lake, peacefully, calm and still.
And when I work, let me work,
Like a bee, wholeheartedly.
And when I play, let me play,
Like a breeze, fresh and cool, light and clear.
~adapted from Wendell Berry’s “When I Rise” in The Mad Farmer Poems

The thistles, rooted out, throng in again;
The single regal rose is mobbed by weeds;
The plums, the pears, the ripening apples, rain
In the sun; and past summer plants new seeds.

Here, or there, these common yearly things
Repeat, repeat, and gardens do not range:
Yet thistles, roses, fruit trees, birds, and stings
Come to an end, and the church bells sound a change.

These many soft declensions of the day,
So hard to take to heart, bear life away.
~Dunstan Thompson from “Passage” from Here At Last Is Love

This end-of-summer winding down,
a descent into shorter days and longer nights,
this preparation for autumn austerity,
reminds me to accept my own slow decline ~
an emptying husk
once so full of fruit and seed,
now clinging to what is left of me ~
still filled with the joys, the tears, the eyes
of a brimming-over heart.

The Roar of Sunset

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I go to nature not because
its flowers and sunsets speak
to me (though they do) or
listen to me inquire but

because I have filled it with
unintentionality, so that I
can miss anything personal in
the roar of sunset, so that

I can in beds of flowers hold
my head up too.
~A.R. Ammons from The Ridge Farm from Complete Poems

Take the tangle instead of the trouble it causes.
Take the world inside
as seriously as any other.
Take your elderly mother and father
at face value as they have to.
Take the mirror of the sky
mirrored in the bay.
Take the swell of new-mown hay
and the river conversing
where the valley opens its mouth
and the land begins to creak less
as the evening steals light away—
Take the wick in the far hills
and take the sun and the wind
and the look of nothing for granted.
Take a little less, all right
and try not to take fright.
Take the end in mind
instead of the end in sight.
~Brian Turner “Take This” from Taking Off

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from The Book of Hours

Each of us,
intentionally made by our Creator
in His image,
yet we discover the beauty and terror of living
in His shadow.

So much happens which we don’t intend
but there is nothing unintentional with God.

Books and lectures tell us to live intentionally
while each day contains something that
brings us to our knees.

I tell myself:
even though I don’t know what tomorrow will be,
I will not take fright
Like a flower, I’ll hold my head up
I’ll just keep going
while taking His Hand and following
wherever He intends to take me.

Feeling the Twinges of this World

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Under a canopy of leaves,
the irises, bountiful,
the calico butterfly flashing

and this one golden head
of a dazzling sunflower grasping
its cowled neck,

outweighing its stalk

in order to turn,
full bonneted,
to the absolute light.

What wonders these are:
things struggling
filament by filament,

birds twittering in a laughter
that could be weeping,
barely feeling the twinges of this world,

where the weak get stronger
or snailish with cracks

a day at a time.
~Judith Harris “Recovery”

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.
~Rainier Marie Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet

We feel the twinges of struggling to live broken in difficult times; indeed, all our days are difficult times.

We won’t get out of this predicament alive, yet we are loved.

Whether we care or not about what happens
after our last breath does not alter the fact
Christ dwells alongside us;
our heavy heads bow as we turn to face
the compelling Light.

Like Mary, we must say:  “Let it be,” – not “no, not me, not now.”

We are transformed by accepting He has come on our behalf:
an oh-so-difficult faith connecting us like a slender filament to heaven:
like the bird greeting the morning with songs that weep,
like the butterfly emerging from its cracked chrysalis to try its wings,
like the cracked snail shell abandoned
because we no longer fit inside its broken confinement.

A Warm and Steady Sweetness

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It’s ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife’s eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect–
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?
~Albert Garcia “August Morning” from Skunk Talk


I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don’t think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds or, satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.
~ Wendell Berry “VII.” from Leavings. 

…today, the unseen was everything.
The unknown, the only real fact of life.
All this he saw,
for one moment breathless and intense,
vivid on the morning sky;
and still, as he looked, he lived;
and still, as he lived, he wondered.
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

How do I start this day
when I am unsure of the immense unknown?

I begin by looking.
I live with wonder and astonishment;
yet another morning has been gifted to me.

Even if sleep proved elusive,
the air through the windows still warm at midnight.
When even a melon-colored sky looks dry
along with everything beneath it.

When wildfire smoke still drifts in on waves from the north and east, both obscuring and rounding the sharp edges of mountain peaks.

I wonder, grateful, for the sweetness
on this tepid summer morning
offering itself to me.

I’m here.
I look, I live, I wonder.
Let the day begin, opening up into the immense unknown.

Preoccupied by Tiny Flowers

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Still, what I want in my life
Is to be willing
To be dazzled-
To cast aside the weight of facts

And maybe even
To float a little
Above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking 

Into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything —
that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
~Mary Oliver from “The Ponds” from House of Light

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
~Emily Dickinson 1263

Who would have thought it possible that a tiny little flower could preoccupy a person so completely that there simply wasn’t room for any other thought?
~ Sophie Scholl from At the Heart of the White Rose

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 from “From Blossoms”

I can’t always handle all the truth all at once,
especially when it hurts. 

It is best if truth
coaxes me slowly out of the shadows
where I like to hunker down, preoccupied,
like a tight little bud refusing to open.

Truth told slant is an illuminating back drop,
encouraging me to peek out from the darkness,
open up, dazzled by the light.

And then, perhaps,
~just maybe~
I too may become almost
dazzling to behold.

Unencumbered by My Old Nonsense

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How did I come to be
this particular version of me,
and not some other, this morning
of purple delphiniums
blooming like royalty,
destined to meet these three dogs
asleep at my feet, and not others—
this soft summer morning,
sitting on her screened porch
become ours, our wind chime
singing of wind and time,
yellow-white digitalis
feeding bees and filling me—
and more abundance to come:
basil, tomatoes, zucchini.
What luck or fate, instinct,
or grace brought me here—
in shade, beneath hidden stars,
a soft, summer morning,
seeing with my whole being,
love made visible.
~Laura Foley “The Once Invisible Garden” from Sledding in the Valley of the Shadow 

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,
breathless heat.
I sit on the ground
in the garden of Carmel,
picking ripe cherry tomatoes
and eating them.
They are so ripe that the skin is split,
so warm and sweet
from the attentions of the sun,
the juice bursts in my mouth,
an ecstatic taste,
and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,
sloshing in the saliva of August.
Hummingbirds halo me there,
in the great green silence,
and my own bursting heart
splits me with life.
~Anne Higgins “Cherry Tomatoes” from At the Year’s Elbow

photo by Josh Scholten

At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.

Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.

How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?
~Albert Garcia from “August Morning”  from Skunk Talk 

Write it in your heart that every day is the best day of the year.
Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, breathe the wild air.
Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day.
You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit
to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson from Collected Poems and Translations

She has done what she could…
~Mark 14:8

How do I start this gift of a new August summer day?

When sleep is elusive, the air too still and warm at midnight
When even a cloud-strewn sky looks dry
When wildfire smoke drifts in on waves from north and east, obscuring, rounding out the sharp edges

Yet I taste the sweetness offered this tepid summer morning,
unencumbered by my old over-thinking nonsense.

I’m here, present and accounted for, blessed by all I see.
I am doing what I can.
Let the day begin.

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe
Me.”

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
~Daniel Ladinsky, from “The Gift”

In Choral Procession

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In noisy shades
of apricot and pink
the blossoms

of the gladiola open
all down the long aisle
of the stem

like a choral procession
or the woody
notes

of a flute
opening one stop
at a time.
~Linda Pastan “Gladiola”

Most flowers tempt our senses:
vibrant colors to the eye,
softness of the petals to the touch,
delicate fragrances wafting to the nose –
even some have a piquant perfumed taste for the palate.

Yet how many blooms sound like an orchestra
tuning in the wind?

A long gladiola stalk rises boldly,
swaying in the breeze, each key
blossom unfolding one by one in flowing overture,
a kaleidoscope symphone planted in a row.

When each is done with its own ruffled note,
the next one opens to play its part,
in harmony with its neighbor.

The notes progress up the stem
until the final chord is held
~fermata-like~
until performances commence
again next summer.

I’ll be sure to reserve a front row seat.

And Light Splashed…

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Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
and still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed…”

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
~Stanley Kunitz  “The Round” from Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected

It is too easy to be ground to a pulp by the various irritations of the day – aggravations are too easily expressed, worries never seem to wane – all of it sucks gladness out of me. 

When my feelings become four-dimensional and surround and drown me, I lose all perspective on what got me out of bed to begin the day.

God is in these intricate details, whether the splash of light on a petal or the smell of rotting compost; it is my job to notice this. It is tempting to look past His ubiquitous presence in all things, to seek out only the elegant grandeur of creation and bypass the plain and smelly and homely.

Yet even what lacks beauty from my limited perspective is worthy of His divine attention. He knows the value and purpose of each thing He created, including me and the things that aggravate me no end – like mosquitos.

The time has come to be refreshed and renewed
even when surrounded by decay.
His care is revealed in the tiniest way.
He is worthy of my attention because I am constantly worthy of His.

If I rise early enough, I can see each new day’s light splash everything awake. By the time I come in to sit down to record my words and photos, I’m thoroughly washed by a fresh dawn. I can scarcely wait to take on what this day will bring.

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

Waking with the Light

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Light wakes us – there’s the sun
climbing the mountains’ rim, spilling across the valley,
finding our faces.
It is July,
between the hay and harvest,
a time at arm’s length from all other time,
the roads ragged with meadowsweet and mallow,
with splays of seedheads, slubbed and coarse, rough linen.
The fields above the house, clotted with sheep all spring,
are empty now and froth with flowering grasses,
still in the morning light. Birds move around
the leafy fields, the leafy garden.

It is the time
to set aside all vigil, good or ill,
to loosen the fixed gaze of our attention
as dandelions let seedlings to the wind.
Wake with the light.
Get up and go about the day and watch
its surfaces that brighten with the sun.

And later, when the light is drowsed and heavy
go find the burdened fruit trees where the shade
lies splashed and opened-out across the ground.
Spread over it a quilt worn soft by other bodies,
then curl and fall down into sleep at light.

Awaken to a world of long, loose grass-stems,
and leaves above,
and birds, breaking out of the leaves.
~Kerry Hardie from “Sleep in Summer”

Saying good-bye to July last week
meant admitting summer is already half-baked
and so are we–

we who are still doughy,
not nearly done enough.

The rush to autumn is breathless.
We want to hold on tight
to our longish days,
fall asleep in the grasses,
endure sweaty nights
for just a little while longer…

Please, oh please
grant us unending light
and steady us for the task
of getting ready for letting go.

A new series of summer photo notecards from our farm is now available as a thank you gift to you for your financial support of Barnstorming — details here

Unfolding Before My Eyes

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Tonight at dusk we linger by the fence
around the garden, watching the wound husks
of moonflowers unclench themselves slowly,
almost too slow for us to see their moving—
you notice only when you look away
and back, until the bloom decides,
or seems to decide, the tease is over,
and throws its petals backward like a sail
in wind, a suddenness about this as though
it screams, almost the way a newborn screams
at pain and want and cold, and I still hear
that cry in the shout across the garden
to say another flower is about to break.
I go to where my daughter stands, flowers
strung along the vine like Christmas lights,
one not yet lit. We praise the world by making
others see what we see. So now she points and feels
what must be pride when the bloom unlocks itself
from itself. And then she turns to look at me.
~James Davis May “Moonflowers” from 32 Poems Magazine

When once the sun sinks in the west,
And dewdrops pearl the evening’s breast;
Almost as pale as moonbeams are,
Or its companionable star,
The evening primrose opes anew
Its delicate blossoms to the dew;
And, hermit-like, shunning the light,
Wastes its fair bloom upon the night,
Who, blindfold to its fond caresses,
Knows not the beauty it possesses;
Thus it blooms on while night is by;
When day looks out with open eye,
Bashed at the gaze it cannot shun,
It faints and withers and is gone.
~John Clare “Evening Primrose”

Ever since I was a kid, I have needed to share with others something special I’ve seen — a “hey, take a look at this!” moment so I can witness it again through their eyes.

Sharing can make it even sweeter.

Sometimes others see what I see; sometimes not.
Sometimes others wonder what has gotten into me.

I was an odd farm kid, no question: a summer twilight’s entertainment might be watching evening primrose blossoms open at night.

Evening primrose and moonflower are night blooming plants meant to attract pollinating moths. 

At dusk, (one could set one’s watch by the primrose’s punctuality) one green wrapped bud per stem would open, revealing a bright yellow blossom with four delicate veined petals, a rosette of stamens and a cross-shaped stigma in the center, rising far above the blossom. The yellow was so vivid and lively, it seemed almost like a drop of sun was left on earth to light the night. By morning, the bloom would begin to wither and wilt under the real sunlight, somehow overcome with the brightness, and would blush a pinkish orange as it folded upon itself, ready to die and drop from the plant in only a day or two, leaving a bulging seed pod behind.

As a kid, I would settle cross-legged on our damp lawn at twilight to watch the choreography of the opening of evening primrose blossoms. With diminishing light and cooler temperatures, there would be a sudden loosening of the protective green husk, an almost audible release. Then over the course of about a minute, the overlapping yellow petals would unfurl, slowly, gently and purposefully in an unlocking action that revealed their pollen treasure trove inside.  

It was like watching time lapse cinematography, only this was an accelerated, real time flourish of sudden beauty, happening right before my eyes. 

It was magic. I always felt privileged to witness each unveiling as so few flowers ever allow us to behold their unfolding.

On those lazy summer evenings, my younger brother wasn’t nearly as impressed when I tried to lure him into becoming flower-audience along with me. That’s okay; I was always underwhelmed by the significance of his favorite football team’s touchdowns that he insisted on sharing with me.

He was sure my priorities were screwy.

Possibly he was right. Even so, I wanted you all to know about something so special as a flower knowing exactly the best time to open to attract nocturnal pollinators, and manages it in under a minute, all because the waning light and cooler temperatures causes a sudden rush of cellular fluid into the bottom hinges of the petals, forcing them to pop open.

What a smart plant. What an even smarter God, worthy of praise.