Even the plainest among us become beautiful when bathed in the right light…
Tag: dandelion
Caught Summer
Caught Summer is always an imagined time.
Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind.
There must be prime
In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain
   and find
Riding the palest days
Its perfect blaze.
~Richard Wilbur from “My Father Paints the Summer”
The Ease That Belongs to Simplicity
There may be restrictions to a summer’s happiness,
but the ease that belongs to simplicity
is charming enough to make up for
whatever a simple life may lack…
~Sarah Orne Jewett from The Country of the Pointed Firs
Fathomless Mystery
 
There is no event so commonplace
but that God is present within it,
always hiddenly,
always leaving you room to recognize Him
or not…
Listen to your life.
See it for the
fathomless mystery that it is.
In the boredom and pain of it no less
than in the excitement and gladness:
touch, taste, smell your way to the
holy and hidden art of it
because in the last analysis
all moments are key moments…..
and Life itself is Grace.
~Frederick Buechner from Now and Then- Listening to Your Life
A Constant Evasion
Poetry may make us from time to time
a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings
which form the substratum of our being,
to which we rarely penetrate;
for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
—T.S. Eliot
An Ordinary Day
…it’s easy to forget that the ordinary is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over again. Sometimes the beauty of your life is apparent. Sometimes you have to go looking for it. And just because you have to look for it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
God, grant me the grace of a normal day.
~Billy Coffey
Now all I see are dandelions on fire in the field.
To think I’ve walked through,
on top of,
over and around them for almost 60 years,
and only now I see what magic they contain
if I just settle down at their level and look.
When Flowers Were Suns
The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were suns and fiery spots of sky strewn throughout the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the cast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire.
~Ray Bradbury from Dandelion Wine
Those Spiky Suns
How I loved those spiky suns,  Â
rooted stubborn as childhood  Â
in the grass, tough as the farmer’s  Â
big-headed children—the mats  Â
of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe.  Â
How sturdy they were and how  Â
slowly they turned themselves  Â
into galaxies, domes of ghost stars  Â
barely visible by day, pale  Â
cerebrums clinging to life  Â
on tough green stems.   Like you.  Â
Like you, in the end.   If you were here,  Â
I’d pluck this trembling globe to show  Â
how beautiful a thing can be  Â
a breath will tear away. Â
~Jean Nordhaus “A Dandelion for My Mother”
~Jean Nordhaus “A Dandelion for My Mother”
The lawn is filled with them now
yellow spots in carpeted green
closed tight at night,
in the morning,
opening as miniature reflections
of the real dawn.
Growing up, paid ten cents per dandelion
I dug up each long offending root,
restoring the blemished green
to pristine perfection;
no more yellow splotches
unruly stems
blow away ghosts
releasing scores of
seedy offspring.
But it didn’t last.
The perfect lawn
like the perfect life~
unbesmirched~
isn’t possible.
The hardy seeds of trouble
float innocently on the breeze
or lie hidden deep in our soil
ready to spring up overnight
and overtake us.
Maybe that is our fear
of those little spunky spiky suns:
their cheerful glow
belies their pernicious
tendency to own us,
heart and soul.
Barnstorming 