Summer Farm

Henry Mosler

Summer Farm 


Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass
The water in the horse-trough shines.
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.
A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.
I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me – as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.
Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

Norman McCaig 


“Threaded on time…” A pile of selves. Ha! Interesting. Also the idea of lifting a lid and looking down into the scene. Maybe we should be afraid of where our thoughts might take us! Or maybe we just need more practice at it.

After Rain

Geri Waddington

After Rain

The snails have made a garden of green lace:
broderie anglaise from the cabbages,
chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils-
I see already that I lift the blind
upon a woman's wardrobe of the mind.

Such female whimsy floats about me like
a kind of tulle, a flimsy mesh,
while feet in gumboots pace the rectangles-
garden abstracted, geometry awash-
an unknown theorem argued in green ink,
dropped in the bath.
Euclid in glorious chlorophyll, half drunk.

I none too sober slipping in the mud
where rigged with guys of rain
the clothes-reel gauche
as the rangy skeleton of some
gaunt delicate spidery mute
is pitched as if
listening;
while hung from one thin rib
a silver web-
its infant, skeletal, diminutive,
now sagged with sequins, pulled ellipsoid,
glistening.

I suffer shame in all these images.
The garden is primeval, Giovanni
in soggy denim squelches by my hub,
over his ruin
shakes a doleful head.
But he so beautiful and diademed,
his long Italian hands so wrung with rain
I find his ache exists beyond my rim
and almost weep to see a broken man
made subject to my whim.

O choir him, birds, and let him come to rest
within this beauty as one rests in love,
till pears upon the bough
encrusted with
small snails as pale as pearls
hang golden in
a heart that know tears are a part of love.

And choir me too to keep my heart a size
larger than seeing, unseduced by each
bright glimpse of beauty striking like a bell,
so that the whole may toll,
its meaning shine
clear of the myriad images that still-
do what I will-encumber its pure line.

P.K. Page

Look how she does it. Broderie anglaise, chantilly, tulle, chlorophyl, sequins, ellisoid, theorum, encrusted, diademmed, pearls. From these she makes lace out of cabbages, geometry out of garden steps, silver webs out of clothes-lines, a king out of a gardener, jewels out of raindrops. The images she casts on our mind's eye are extraordinary. I see old mythological gardens  - "pears upon the bough/ encrusted with/ small snails as pale as pearls/ hang golden" - is this the Garden of the Hesperides where Hercules travels to find the golden fruit? Is this an enchanted garden? Or a pest-ridden, soggy cabbage patch worked by gum-booted and discouraged gardener? And then that "O choir him, birds," - and "Keep my heart a size larger than seeing." reminds me of Dylan Thomas - and really, isn't that the key line?

"Keep my heart a size larger than seeing."

A Seedling

Benoit Trimborn

A seedling shoulders up some crumbs of ground:

The fields are suddenly green for miles around.

HO-O

fr. A Net of Fireflies

translated by Harold Stewart

Sneaky spring. She did it again.

the beautiful changes

Morna Rhys

The Beautiful Changes

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”.  Such an intertwining of meaning! (Like the twisting of many threads into one.) Is it saying that changes are beautiful, or that that change is what makes for beauty, or that beauty changes us - or all of those things in turn? I don't grasp this poem fully or even half-ly, but I like it. (For one thing, Queen Anne's Lace is my favourite flower, and walking through a field of them, as I can in this poem, is something I want to do a lot of.) It's the line, "The beautiful changes as a forest is changed/By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it." that makes me pause. Is Wilbur saying that Beauty changes the person (or animal or thing or whatever) who has contact with it? And that if I (a kind of chameleon, yes,  mantis? well, maybe) spend time in the forest (or any beautiful place like it) long enough to become "in tune" with it, not only does it change me, but I change it, "deepen" it, as it were? Is that what he means? And then, "Your hands hold roses always in a way that says they are not only yours." And what is "a second finding"? It sounds like an offering, the way the roses are held, a sharing, or a transferring. And this mention of how the beautiful "sunder(s)/Things and thing's selves for a second finding" - could that be saying that there is a kind of merging that happens with us and the beautiful? A joining and deepening of both otherwise separate things? (This is straining my brain a bit.) 

This is what I take from it, right or wrong:
The lovely image of walking through a field of Queen Ann's Lace and the flowers swaying and moving as I pass.
Your hands full of roses. And the idea that touching or holding or being within beauty changes me. And the crazy thought that I add to it, too, that this wonder I feel is a kind of sharing between myself and Beauty. 
And, of course, that poetry is beautiful, and changes me.