Satisfied

Troubled and burdened, I go to the woods
where the trees are not trying so hard.
Not striving for the light,
simply letting what is in them unfold.

Water in the brook whose flow is merely surrender.
Birds letting go of their songs, songs threading
through woods as far as they go.
Leaves untroubled to be turning the color of death.

A snake growing a skin to shed,
a pod growing a seed to release.
Only gradually do I realize
how content I am to be here.

A nuthatch works a little branch,
finding something tiny here and there,
until she is done and turns and flies off,
satisfied.

Steve Garnaas-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, September 26, 2019

The Scent of Apple Cake

My mother cooked as drudgery
the same fifteen dishes round
and round like a donkey bound
to a millstone grinding dust.

My mother baked as a dance,
the flour falling from the sifter
in a rain of fine white pollen.
The sugar was sweet snow.

The dough beneath her palms
was the warm flesh of a baby
when they were all hers before
their wills sprouted like mushrooms.

Cookies she formed in rows
on the baking sheets, oatmeal,
molasses, lemon, chocolate chip,
delights anyone could love.

Love was in short supply,
but pies were obedient to
her command of their pastry, crisp
holding the sweetness within.

Desserts were her reward for
cleaning in the acid yellow cloud
of Detroit, begging dollars from
my father, mending, darning, bleaching.

In the oven she made sweetness
where otherwise there was none.

Marge Piercy, Made in Detroit (Knopf, 2015)

The History Teacher

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"
The War of Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children could leave his classroom
for the playground and torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

Billy Collins, Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, Inc., 2002)

Photograph

He washed his feet for the picture,
even his knees,
and wondered about that man
who cared enough to want him to sit there
for a photograph,
even though he didn't have
nothing good to hold in his hands,
nor even a dog to sit by his chair.
It gave him, briefly,
some sort of feeling
of just being
enough.

Cynthia Rylant


Photo by Walker Evans, hired by the Farm Security
Administration to document the country during the
Great Depression

Marks

My husband gives me an A
for last night's supper
an incomplete for my ironing
a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes
in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait 'till they learn

I'm dropping out.

Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief  (W. W. Norton & Co., 1978)

His Elderly Father as a Young Man

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn't in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn't want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with a pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica that I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away --
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed;
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such a letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.
Jennie had gone to California
not long after that dance.
I pretty much got over
wanting to see her just once more,
but I wish I could have kept the letter,
even though I know it by heart.

Leo Dangel, Home from the Field (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997)

Chivalry

He strolls down the middle of the sidewalk
leaving little room for me. I lag behind
to get around an open gate, to avoid
a fence post, a mail box sticking out.
You don't walk as fast as you used to, he says,
striding ahead on his personal red carpet,
feet turned slightly out, a spring in his step
like he's about to go up for a jump shot.
I dodge a low branch and the open door
of a parked car. Just as I decide
to hip-check him out into the street
he stops and crouches to pet
a little white cat, He croons to her,
stroking her arched back. The cat
closes her eyes and I think of how he sleeps
nestled against me, turning when I turn
all night long, and never wakes me.

Debra Spencer, Pomegranate (Hummingbird, Press, 2004)

In Memoriam

In the early afternoon my mother
was doing the dishes. I climbed
onto the kitchen table, I suppose
to play, and fell asleep there.
I was drowsy and awake, though,
as she lifted me up, carried me
on her arms into the living room,
and placed me on the davenport,
but I pretended to be asleep
the whole time, enjoying the luxury --
I was too big for such a privilege
and just old enough to form
my only memory of her carrying me.
She's still carrying me to a softer place.

Leo Dangel, Saving Singletrees (WSC Press, 2013)

The farm wife turns off the TV evangelist

The Jesus I grew up with
likes to be outside.
If he's not fishing, he's picking figs
or showing us his mustard crop.
He prefers dusty roads, the common sparrow,
and lilies of the field.
When he knocks on your door
holding a lantern, you know it's time
to buckle on overshoes
and go with him to feed the sheep.

But this preacher, who looks straight
into the camera and claims he knows
Jesus, says what he wants
is for me to believe in him
so he can come inside.

That sounds shifty to me.
Like a wolf with his paws dipped in flour.

Jesus who knows the blind
said we will know a tree by its fruit.

Shari Wagner, The Farm Wife's Almanac (Dream Seekers Books, 2019)

My time in better dresses

I remember job hunting in my shoddy
and nervous working class youth,
how I had to wear nylons and white
gloves that were dirty in half an hour
for jobs that barely paid for shoes.

Don't put down Jew, my mother
warned, just say Protestant, it
doesn't commit you to anything.
Ads could still say "white" and
in my childhood, we weren't.

I worked in better dresses in Sam's
cut-rate department store, $3.98
and up. I wasn't trusted to sell.
I put boxes together, wrapped,
cleaned out dressing rooms.

My girlfriend and I bought a navy
taffeta dress with cut-out top, wore it
one or the other to parties, till it
failed my sophistication test. The older
"girls" in sales, divorced, sleek,

impressed me, but the man in charge
I hated, the way his eyes stroked,
stripped, discarded. How he docked
our pay for lateness. How he sucked
on his power like a piece of candy.

Marge Piercy, Made in Detroit (Knopf, 2015)

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy

and loving everything.

But in truth it rarely works that way.

For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.

Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes

almost forgetting how wondrous the world is

and how miraculously kind some people can be?

And have you too decided that probably nothing important

is ever easy?

Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,

and some days I feel I have wings.

Mary Oliver, Evidence (Beacon Press, 2009)

Bad News Good News

I was at a camp in the country,
you were home in the city,
and bad news had come to you.

You texted me as I sat
with others around a campfire.
It had been a test you and I

hadn't taken seriously,
hadn't worried about.
You texted the bad news word

cancer. I read it in that circle
around the fire. There was
singing and laughter to my right and left

and there was that word on the screen.
I tried to text back but,
as often happens in that country,

my reply would not send so I went to higher ground.
I stood on a hill above the river and sent you
the most beautiful words I could manage,

put them together, each following each. Under
Ursa Major, Polaris, Cassiopeia, a space station flashing,
I said what had been said

many times, important times, foolish times:
those words which soft-bodied humans say when the news is bad.
The I love you which we wrap around our

need and hurl at the cosmos: Take this, you heartless
nothing and everything, take this.
I chose words to fling into the dark toward  you


while the gray-robed coyote came out of hiding
and the badger wandered the unlit hill
and the lark rested herself in tall grasses;

I sent the most necessary syllables
we have, after all this time the ones we want to hear:
I said Home, I said Love, I said Tomorrow.

Marjorie Saiser, I Have Nothing to Say About Fire (The Blackwaters Press, 2016)

Albert Hinckley

Miss Crandall's Boarding School for Young Ladies of Color,

Canterbury, Connecticut, 1833

Last Sunday, a white boy openly smiled at me

where I sat with my sisters at the back of the Baptist Church.

When the pastor spoke of the sin of slavery,

the white boy looked back with his eyebrows arched.

I could read his thoughts, but I dared not meet his glance,

for nothing must pass between us, not one chance

for gossip to pounce with glee on one shared smile.

No one must think of us as eligible girls.

Waylaid by ruffians as we reached the ford,

our wagon was overturned. Our sodden skirts

weighted and slowed us, but no one was hurt.

Splashing to me, his eyes looking truly scared,

that boy took my hand. "Let me help you, miss.

From this day forward, I am an abolitionist."

Marilyn Nelson,  The Cincinnati Review from Collins, B., & Lehman, D. (2006) The Best American Poetry, 2006 New York: Scribner Poetry

Bedside Reading

  for St. Mark's Episcopal, Good Friday 1999

In his careful welter of dried leaves and seeds,
soil samples, quartz pebbles, notes-to-myself, letters,
on Dr. Carver's bedside table
next to his pocket watch,
folded in Aunt Mariah's Bible:
the Bill of Sale.
Seven hundred dollars
for a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary.

He moves it from passage
to favorite passage.
Fifteen cents
for every day she had lived.
Three hundred fifty dollars
for each son.
No charge
for two stillborn daughters
buried out there with the Carvers' child.

This new incandescent light makes
his evening's reading unwaveringly easy,
if he remembers to wipe his spectacles.
He turns to the blooming story
of Abraham's dumbstruck luck,
of Isaac's pure trust in his father's wisdom.
Seven hundred dollars for all of her future.
He shakes his head.

Marilyn Nelson, A Life in Poems (Front Street, 2001)

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine, --
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

William Blake, public domain

Diagnosis

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face --
he held me, and conversed with me
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She's doing it now! Look!
She's doing it now! And the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

Sharon Olds, One Secret Thing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)