Category: wildflowers

Like a Mist Drying

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Morning glories, pale as a mist drying,
fade from the heat of the day, but already
hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg
hooks have found and are boarding them.

This could do for the sack of the imaginary
fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as they
one by one vanish and leave still real
only what has been snatched out of the spell.

I’ve never seen bees more purposeful except
when the hive is threatened. They know
the good of it must be grabbed and hauled
before the whole feast wisps off.

They swarm in light and, fast, dive in,
then drone out, slow, their pantaloons heavy
with gold and sunlight. The line of them,
like thin smoke, wafts over the hedge.

And back again to find the fleet gone.
Well, they got this day’s good of it. Off
they cruise to what stays open longer.
Nothing green gives honey. And by now

you’d have to look twice to see more than green
where all those white sails trembled
when the world was misty and open
and the prize was there to be taken.
~John Ciardi “Bees and Morning Glories” from The Collected Poems of John Ciardi.

Happiness is like a morning glory:
yesterday’s won’t bloom again;
tomorrow’s hasn’t opened yet.
Only today’s flower can be enjoyed today.
Be happy this very moment,
and you’ll learn how to be happy always.
~ Goswami Kriyananda

I am alive — I guess —
The Branches on my Hand
Are full of Morning Glory —
~Emily Dickinson

Now I’m at seventy,
no longer defined by ambition or career,
I open up misty every morning with a new bloom,
aware what I’ve left undone before wilting away.

A daily unfurling is a chance to:
Start afresh.
Welcome visitors.
Hold hearts gently.
Hum as I walk.
Sometimes just sit in awed silence.
Watch out the window.
Feed those who look hungry.

Each new opening, each new day,
so to leave a little less left undone.

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Beautiful Changes

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One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   
In such kind ways,   
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
~Richard Wilbur “The Beautiful Changes”

I am changed again, as I blend into autumn.

We can’t help but be transformed by everything around us, you know.

Beautiful is the dying meadow, the shedding of dry reddened leaves,
the tidal wave of wildflowers nodding goodbye until next summer.

Beauty is beheld with wonder and then lost to the ages. We cannot change what we see, but treasure its transience, as we cherish our own brief moments here.

We hold on lightly, ready to let go when the time comes.
What comes next is beautiful beyond imagining.

Daisy Morning Music

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See, the grass is full of stars,
Fallen in their brightness;
Hearts they have of shining gold,
Rays of shining whiteness.

Buttercups have honeyed hearts,
Bees they love the clover,
But I love the daisies’ dance
All the meadow over.

Blow, O blow, you happy winds,
Singing summer’s praises,
Up the field and down the field
A-dancing with the daisies.
~Marjorie Pickthall “Daisy Time”

I still can’t say what life is for, but it can’t be to pretend
     that every part of it is knowable, or that what appears to be
to the naked eye or in the middle ground or documented on paper
     approximates a person any better than a daisy does our sun.

When at a loss for what I am, I know I must be feeling it
     deep in the layers, where a turbulence gives rise to clouds
so massive they collapse in a bliss of gravity, condensing into this
      music I can daisy into morning as it daisies me into morning.
~Timothy Donnelly from “Habitable Nebula”

It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another…

At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their – if you don’t
mind my saying so – their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example – I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch –
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.
~Mary Oliver from “Daisies”

I realize I can’t understand what all this world means.

No, I will remain in the dark until I cross from this daisy-strewn field to the next. I have to wait for heaven itself to see why we are illuminated by the Sun.

It is all cloud-covered mystery in the meantime, and sometimes a mean and joyless mystery – with pain and heartbreak and suffering, but just enough loving sacrifice to make it worthwhile.

How are we different from that stone, or that tree or that daisy?

We are breathed on.

God’s breath surges within us, as we laugh out loud, weep mightily and sing out His Words – struggling to be suitable for this field of stars, so often trampled and broken, but with plans to flourish under the illuminating stars created by the Son of heaven.

I Won’t Stop Trying…

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Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.
~Linda Pastan “Rereading Frost” from Queen of a Rainy Country. 

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 
I have been one acquainted with the night.
~Robert Frost “Acquainted with the Night”

I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daisies and everlasting and the
ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be

songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.
~Mary Oliver “Everything” from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two

Some of you ask why I post poems by other authors when I could be writing more original work myself.

My answer, like poet Linda Pastan above is:

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

Yet, like Linda, I’ve decided not to stop trying. Since I’ve committed myself to being here every day to share something that may help me and someone else breathe in the fragrance of words and the world – I try to be the necessary and eloquent silver ping when the Conductor points at me at precisely the right moment in time.

More often, I’m the “clang” creating a ruckus ringing the farm triangle bringing in everyone from all over the barnyard for lunch.

Even when my words feel broken, or I say again what another has already said yet I feel it bears emphasis — I do try to write with quiet hands, in reverence and awe for what unseeable, unspeakable gifts God has granted us all.

I try to celebrate by illuminating words and pictures with a unique “ping” all of my own.

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The Colors of Grace in a Parched Landscape

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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

Little flower,
but if I could understand what you are,
root and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
~  Tennyson

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”

Summer was our best season:
it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots,
or trying to sleep in the tree house;
summer was everything good to eat;
it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape…
~Harper Lee from “To Kill a Mockingbird”

I seek relief anywhere it can be found:
this parched political landscape so filled
with anger and lashing out,
division and distrust,
discouragement and disparity.

I want to be otherwise preoccupied
with the medley of beauty around me,
so there can be no room for other thoughts.

How is it?
— for thousands of years
and in thousands of ways,
God still loves man
even when we turn from Him.

I want to revel in the impossible possible,
in the variegated mosaic of grace
prepared to bloom so bountifully
in an overwhelming tapestry of unity,
between man and man,
and man and God.

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At Summer’s Pace

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Light and wind are running
over the headed grass
as though the hill had 
melted and now flowed.
~Wendell Berry “June Wind” from New Collected Poems

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.
~Philip Larkin “Cut Grass” from The Complete Poems

June is the month when grass grows abundantly.

Light and wind work magic on a field of flowing tall grass. The blades of the mower lay it to the ground in green streams that course up and down the slopes. It lies orderly in stoneless cemetery rows.

Farmer’s fields are lined with rows of mown grass, a precious commodity to be harvested for the livestock to eat the rest of the year. Some of the green is bagged up like big marshmallows for easy storage and some put in silos for later in the winter.

The grass’ death is critical to the life of the animals we raise.

What was once waving and bowing to the wind is cut and crushed:
no longer bending but bent,
no longer flowing but flown,
no longer growing but mown.

At summer’s pace, while the clouds saunter overhead, the grasses are stored as fodder for the beasts of the farm on those cold nights when the wind beats at the doors.

It will melt in their mouths. As we watch them chew, we’ll remember the overflowing abundance of summer in June.

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Making Daisies

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…perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun;
and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike;
it may be that God makes every daisy separately,
but has never got tired of making them.
~G.K. Chesterton from Orthodoxy

Over  the shoulders and slopes of the dune  
I saw the white daisies go down to the sea,  
A host in the sunshine, an army in June,  
The people God sends us to set our hearts free.  
~Bliss William Carman from “Daisies”

As I get older, my daily routine can seem mundane and repetitive to the point of being boring. When our grown children call us to see how we’re doing, I don’t have much new to report (which is just fine with me). It must seem like we’re in a rut. I’m tempted to make stuff up, just to make my day sound more interesting…

Yet, I’ve discovered, if I don’t keep to a steadfast routine, I truly flounder in an unpredictable wilderness of my own making. The sun rises every morning, even if I’m not awake to witness it. It sets every evening without my standing on the hill to watch it go down.

But there is something very comforting about making an effort to be there, my eyes open, treasuring the passage of another day.

Surely God celebrates the predictability of His design and enjoys repetition, whether it is another sunrise or sunset or the reappearance every June of an infinite number of identical daisies?

He remains consistent, persistent and insistent. We need His steadfast reliability to lead us out of our personal chaotic wilderness.

Do it again, God.  Please — please do it again.

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A Speechless Receptacle

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I can write down words, like these, softly...
Give me a little time…
It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, you know.

…my heart panics not to be,
as I long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.
~Mary Oliver from the title poem from “Blue Iris”

To plunge headlong into
the heart of a blossom, its amber eyes
inscrutably focusing on your own,
magnified by a lens of dew.
Whose scent, invisible,
drowns you in opulence, and for which
you can find nothing adequate to say.

You sense that you are loved wholly,
yet are quite unable to understand why.
But then, you lift your face,
creased with the ordinary, to a heaven
that is breaking into blue,
and find your contentment utterly beyond
telling, unspeakable, uncontained.
~Luci Shaw from “Speechless” from  Sea Glass

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, last stanza of “From Blossoms” from Rose.

To live as if
death were nowhere in the future,
instead, to bud, emerge, and blossom,
even when thirsting in the desert of discouragement –
Christ is here, waiting.
 
We are not dying,
but become alive in Him:
an amazing impossible flowering.

I peer inside each bloom as it opens,
needing a flotation device
and depth finder
as I’m likely to get lost,
sweeping and swooning
through the inner space
of life’s deep tunnels,
canyons and corners,
coming up for air before diving in again
to journey into exotic locales
draped in silken hues
~this heaven on a stem~
to immerse and emerge
in the possibilities
of God’s impossible blossom.

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A Delicious Drizzle

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I was enjoying everything: the rain, the path
wherever it was taking me, the earth roots
beginning to stir.
I didn’t intend to start thinking about God,
it just happened.
How God, or the gods, are invisible,
quite understandable
But holiness is visible, entirely.
It’s wonderful to walk along like that,
thought not the usual intention to reach an
answer
but merely drifting.
Like clouds that only seem weightless.
but of course are not.
Are really important.
I mean, terribly important.
Not decoration by any means.
By next week the violets will be blooming.

Anyway, this was my delicious walk in the rain.
What was it actually about?

Think about what it is that music is trying to say.
It was something like that.
~Mary Oliver “Drifting” from Blue Horses

Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.

When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.

The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.

Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.

A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.
~Jane Kenyon “After an Illness, Walking the Dog”

This morning’s drizzly walk
and every surface is baptized
with gentle, loving sprinkles from God.
It reminds us how visible is our holiness;
His covering grace makes us free.

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Hearts and Voices Sing: Anticipate Revival

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March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

but as the light lengthens, preacher
of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand
on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up, too, ready to sign on
for conversion.
~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light was Like

The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out in the sun,
After frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die. 
~Ted Hughes from ” A March Morning Unlike Others” from Ted Hughes. Collected Poems

Spring is emerging slowly from this haggard and droopy winter. All growing things are still stuck in morning frost for another week at least. Then, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape will suddenly turn from monochrome to technicolor, the soundtrack from forlorn to glorious birdsong.

Yearning for spring to commence, I tap my foot impatiently as if owed a timely seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant.  We all have been waiting for the Physician’s announcement that this patient survived some intricate life-changing procedure: “I’m happy to say the Earth is alive after all, now revived and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too sedated for a visit just yet.”

I wait impatiently to celebrate her return to health, knowing this temporary home of ours is still very much alive. She breathes, she thrives, blooming and singing with everything she’s got.
And so will I.

He sends his command to the earth;
    his word runs swiftly.
16 He spreads the snow like wool
    and scatters the frost like ashes.
17 He hurls down his hail like pebbles.
    Who can withstand his icy blast?
18 He sends his word and melts them;
    he stirs up his breezes, and the waters flow.
Psalm 147: 15-18

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”