Garden of the Seasons: The Abundance That Is Mid-Summer

 

Songs of Home

Songbirds, but also talk-birds

Jays, Cardinals, Finches, Sparrows, Robins,

they pay their morning visits,

late morning by the time I attend

 

Discussing the weather in

the long, leafy days of July,

best days of the year,

proclaiming – who knows?

Work done. Eggs laid.

Spouse stuck home in the nest,

time for a stroll around the neighborhood

I'm here. I'm cool.

Are you cool?

Thinking of the Future

 You pull them up,

trim them, cut them short,

rip them from the roots

knowing they will be back again next year,

the ill-placed evergreen expanding its wings to block the sun

 The eagerly green perennial oat grass

expanding its borders into whatever's next door

The familiar creature spins its little hope

   of a flower, a seed to secure tomorrow-land

The undesired, eagerly fertile, always expansive

big-talker with no sex appeal?

He's everywhere,

demanding to know what you plan to do with his earth

that's any better than he is

 

Still you keep going

You're finding hope around the next bend –

you have to find it somewhere:

The future.

Did you plant any of that?

And if you did,

is it very, very strong?       

The Garden of Verse: My Covid Time Poem "News of the Departed" and More New Poems in the August Issue of Verse-Virtual

 

  My Covid Year poem "News of the Departed" is up on the August issue of the journal "Better Than Starbucks" -- I don't know if that's a big phrase for the general (or poetry-reading) public, but from now on it works for me. The issue includes work by 105 contributors in a host of categories such as free verse, haikus, formal, experimental and many others.

"News of the Departed" was my attempt to say something about the sorrows and losses so many were suffering during the Covid pandemic (which apparently is not over, so pardon the past tense). It was written during the spring of 2020 when 'life' in nature was returning strongly, as if to reassure us that the Earth was healthy and life would once again continue for us as before. But it would not go on for all of us.

Here's the link

News of the Departed

I have new work in the August issue of Verse-Virtual as well. My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for including 3 poems of mine in an issue he describes as featuring "more new voices, and some old familiar ones whose work never fails to impress."

Here's the beginning of my poem

Calendar Days

August feels a little late 
You’d thought that by this latter date 
You’d surely have more done 
The bees are in the asters
The butterflies are rare 
The twilights have a sharper tone 
But still more time for fun 
 
September’s songs are mellow 
You’re not going back to school 
Marigolds are yellow 
And resolution is the rule 

....

And the first lines of my poem 

My Mother Lost Two Houses

My mother lost two houses 
It wasn’t hard to do 
Two fathers passed away as well
A story sad but likewise true
A story she would later tell 
when things – or so it seemed to us –
were mostly going swell 

...

To read these poems in full and check out the rest of the issue, 

here's the link  Verse-Virtual August 2021

A few more mid-summer garden pics below: