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Now have come the shining days
When field and wood are robed anew,
And o’er the world a silver haze
Mingles the emerald with the blue.
Summer now doth clothe the land
In garments free from spot or stain—
The lustrous leaves, the hills untanned,
The vivid meads, the glaucous grain.
The day looks new, a coin unworn,
Freshly stamped in heavenly mint;
The sky keeps on its look of morn;
Of age and death there is no hint.
How soft the landscape near and far!
A shining veil the trees infold;
The day remembers moon and star;
A silver lining hath its gold.
Again I see the clover bloom,
And wade in grasses lush and sweet;
Again has vanished all my gloom
With daisies smiling at my feet.
Again from out the garden hives
The exodus of frenzied bees;
The humming cyclone onward drives,
Or finds repose amid the trees.
At dawn the river seems a shade—
A liquid shadow deep as space;
But when the sun the mist has laid,
A diamond shower smites its face.
The season’s tide now nears its height,
And gives to earth an aspect new;
Now every shoal is hid from sight,
With current fresh as morning dew.
~John Burroughs “June’s Coming”
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
Comes like the stir of day:
One whose breath is a fragrance,
One whose eyes reveal the road to stars,
The wind in his countenance,
The glory of heaven upon his back.
He steps like a vision hung in air,
Diffusing the passion of eternity;
His abode is the sunlight of morn,
The music of eve his speech:
In his sight,
One shall turn from the dust of the grave,
And move upward to the woodland.
~Yone Noguchi “The Poet”
Each month is special in its own way: I tend to favor April and October for how the light plays on the landscape during transitional times — a residual of what has been, with a hint of what lies ahead.
Then there is June. Dear, gentle, abundant and overwhelming June. Nothing is dried up, there is such a rich feeling of ascension into lushness of summer with an “out of school” attitude, even if someone like me has graduated long ago.
And the light, and the birdsong and the dew and the greens — such vivid verdant greens. The stir of the day stirs my heart…
As lovely as June is, 30 days is more than plenty or I would become helplessly saturated. Then I can be released from my sated stupor to wistfully hunger for June for 335 more.
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when the sun peeks over the horizon to greet
the day and spread golden honey warmth
to the dark, sleepy earth
when the birds begin to stir and twitter
and tune their songs to one another
when the trees rustle as the morning breeze
opens her eyes from slumber, and the dew is heavy
on the blades of grass
when I know morning has come once again
and we are not lost to the night, even as we
are not lost to the day
light dawns, and I can move again
breathing in streams of fresh morning air
lighting a candle for rejuvenation
and praying the day in with ginger and
salt and clay
oh how lovely it feels to be alive
how magical to wake with the light
and live
~Juniper Klatt “when the sun” from I was raised in a house of water.
Each morning is a fresh try at life,
a new chance to get things right
when our yesterdays are broken.
So I drink deeply of the golden dawn,
take a full breath of cool air and dive in head first
into luminous light and bushels of blossoms,
hoping I too might float on the morning magic.
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Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from Flower-de-Luce
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
~Louise Glück “The Wild Iris”
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
~Mary Oliver “Blue Iris”
May your blooms be floriferous and in good form,
Distinctive, with good substance, flare, and airborne,
With standards and falls that endure, never torn.
May you display many buds and blooms sublime,
In graceful proportion on strong stalks each day,
Gently floating above the fans and the fray.
May you too reach toward the moon and stars,
Bloom after bloom, many seasons in the sun,
Enjoying your life, health, and each loved one,
Until your living days are artfully done.
~Georgia Gudykunst “Iris Blessing”
Whenever I allow my eye to peer inside
an iris, it takes all my attention.
I need a flotation device
and depth finder as
I’m likely to get lost,
sweeping and swooning
through inner space
of complex tunnels, canyons and corners,
then coming up for air and diving in again
to journey into exotic locales
draped in silken hues.
This fairy land of petals on a stem,
is birthed by the creative genius of God.
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If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
~Billy Collins “Today”
The Truman Show was about someone stuck in a “perfect” world,
safely contained, in a perpetual snow globe.
Today I want to release the caged and captive,
to be immersed in what awaits outside.
Indeed, Someone sprung me loose to find my Spring,
in one breath-taking and breath-giving moment.
Let’s open wide the windows…
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Every moment is a fresh beginning.
~T.S. Eliot
What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it…
For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day.
After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
~Kazuo Ishiguro from The Remains of the Day
I am ashamed to admit how much time I spend looking back, yearning for a day that has long since passed, tossing off these present precious hours as somehow not measuring up to what came before.
There have been nearly forty years of such days on this farm, one flowing gently after another, and most were exactly what I hoped for.
Even when I believe things will never change, they will, and I will. What is left of the remains of the day may be the best yet.
I toss my heart ahead and set out after it.
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I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me
to love the world, making it impossible
to turn away completely, to shut it out completely ever again –
it is everywhere; when I close my eyes,
birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses:
you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth –
why would you wound me, why would you want me
desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope
I would refuse to see that finally
nothing was left to me, and would believe instead
in the end you were left to me.
~Louise Glück “Vespers” (one of ten Vespers poems)
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
~Psalm 130:5
Mid-spring days like this:
bright, so promising with potential,
birdsong constantly in the air,
scent of orchard blossoms, lilacs,
early roses and a flush of color everywhere…
how can we not love the world so much we never want to leave it?
Yet we must hold this loosely.
It is but a tiny show of the glories to come,
of what You have waiting for us next.
I am wounded knowing I must eventually let this go.
I am hungry for hope that isn’t found
in all this beauty and lushness,
the fulfilling hope that is only
You as my Father and Creator.
You provide only a taste here.
I know what I starve for,
so starved with hope for what You have in store.
I will wait for you
I will wait for you
in the end You were left for me.
Amen and Amen.
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Lined with light
the twigs are stubby arrows.
A gilded trunk writhes
Upward from the roots,
from the pit of the black tentacles.
In the book of spring
a bare-limbed torso
is the first illustration.
Light teaches the tree
to beget leaves,
to embroider itself all over
with green reality,
until summer becomes
its steady portrait
and birds bring their lifetime
to the boughs.
Then even the corpse
light copies from below
may shimmer, dreaming it feels
the cheeks of blossom.
~May Swenson “April Light”
This world is not defeated by death.
An unprecedented illumination
emerged from the tomb on a bright Sabbath morning
to guarantee that
we struggling people,
we who feel we are no more than bare twigs and stubs,
we who aren’t budging from where we are rooted,
are now begetting green,
ready to burst into blossom,
our glowing cheeks pink with life,
a picture of our future fruitfulness.
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The fields are snowbound no longer;
There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green.
The snow has been caught up into the sky—
So many white clouds—and the blue of the sky is cold.
Now the sun walks in the forest,
He touches the boughs and stems with his golden fingers;
They shiver, and wake from slumber.
Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls. …
Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears….
A wind dances over the fields.
Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter,
Yet the little blue lakes tremble
And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver.
~Katherine Mansfield “Very Early Spring”
You might say that clouds have no nationality
Being flags of no country, flaunting their innocent neutrality
Across frontiers, ignorant of boundaries;
But these clouds are clearly foreign, such an exotic clutter
Against the blue cloth of the sky
I want to rummage among them, I want to turn them over
With eager fingers, I want to bargain
For this one or that one, I want to haggle and dicker
Over the prices, and I want to see my clouds wrapped up
In sheets of old newspapers, and give them away
To young girls to pin in their hair
Or tuck them, glossy as gardenias, behind an ear,
Or stretch one out to the length of a lacy shawl
And toss it over a shoulder, or around a waist.
~Constance Urdang “Clouds”
Our farm sits about 9 miles from an international border. The sky and clouds are oblivious to the line drawn by two governments, and don’t bother to stop at the border stations controlling access of humans across that line.
The clouds are free to go where they please, so they do, while we watch. They are both a foreign and domestic cloud of witnesses to our earthbound follies and foolishness.
No passports or IDs, no being pulled into “secondary” for more intensive searches and questioning, no being “turned back” not allowed across, no deportations.
They simply float and glide where the breezes take them, assuming whatever shape, identity or characteristics they wish.
What a beautiful day in the neighborhood if one happens to be a cloud or a cloud of witnesses…
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It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.
― William Carlos Williams
All the field’s a hymn!
All trilliums unfold
white flames above their trinities
of leaves…
now
make of our hearts a field
to raise your praise
~Luci Shaw from “Spring song, very early morning” from The Green Earth: Poems of Creation
The flaw is no more
noticeable, even to me,
than a new moth-hole
in my sweater, or
a very bald spot
on the fabric of
my velvet vest.
Yet when
I hold the cloth
up to the window
the sunlight
bleeds through.
~Luci Shaw “Defect”
The trillium only thrives where death has been.
The mulch of hundreds of autumns
fluffs the bed where trillium bulbs sleep,
quietly content through most of the year.
When the frost is giving way to dew,
the trillium leaves peek out, curious, testing the air.
A few stray rays of sun filtering through the overgrowth and canopy encourage the shoots to rise, spread and unfurl.
In the middle, a white bud appears in humility,
almost embarrassed to be seen at all.
In a matter of days, the petals spread wide and bold so briefly,
curl purplish, wilt and return aground.
Leaves wither and fall unnoticed, becoming dust once again.
Then, beauty will rise from decay.
Death gives way to pure triune perfection.
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16
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Barnstorming 