The Garden of the Seasons: Monthly Reminders

 Every year, at year's end we make a calendar for the coming year consisting of photos taken in every month of the preceding year. Here are this year's exemplars. [Quotes come from recent poems.]

January 

They're flighty

they keep flying away from imaginary dangers

Who knew the world was so pitted 

by emergency in the watches

of the wintry morning

from The Birds of Winter

 

February

birds cease their endless ebb and fly to pose for my happy season album close-ups 

-- from At Least I Was Alive 

March

Things to do:

Fertilize perennials

Add mulch to hold the water

Plant more native plants

More bulbs? Crocuses? -- from A Year of the Garden

April

Your towering daystar

That tosses spring flowers into the shade

and drowns the trills of April

when nesting songs are on the wing -- from

A Poem About Summer 

May 

They are burying children

On the first days of June

The world is a beautiful place

That we have turned into a slaughterhouse

I ask the Roses to forgive me

I beg the Irises to stay a while longer

And help us become as they are, keepers of beauty--from Slaughter of the Innocents

June 

The dream that wakes me in the morning

The good fortune to be here still

The good love

I don’t know, can tulips say that?

Soon it will be roses -- from All We Really Have Are Tulips

July 

To be the god I once played at becoming,

Naming the spring,

Demanding a dance of attendance,

All those white and purple flags of allegiance

Rippling in the joyful days

To come -- from Spring Rain

August 

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 -- from Calendar Days 

September

September’s songs are mellow

You’re not going back to school

Marigolds are yellow

And resolution is the rule -- Calendar Days 

October

Edged by the

late, late bloomers

Mums the word -- Calendar Days

November 

I walk the half-bared, spotted earth

Looking for signs of old friends

Who is back for sure, and who is dicey

Which bets I have placed last autumn

Folding their hands, or their tents before I can plan a rescue -- Spring Rain

December 

What rolls the night, so early in these

     last December days,

rolls the earth backwards, onwards,

back into the light,

Oh, rays of light!

And what pours forth, what pours forth --

from The Heart of the Universe

2022

In the life-giving ecstasies of a Berkshire spring

I am thinking not of lilacs last-blooming

     in the April of the war’s climactic year,

but of the fall of 1858

When a live-ammo demo at Harper’s Ferry exposed

the US Army as the last defense of slavery -- 

from Fighting Words 

Some More garden photos and a few from The Berkshires (below) I'd like to keep around, just 

in case I forget what the world looks like at different times of year.