The garden is no metaphor

“The Gardener”  painting by Lizzie Riches   “This garden is no metaphor ─ more a task that swallows you into itself,  earth using, as always, everything it can.” –  Jan Hirshfield, November, Remembering Voltaire     “An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life.” –  Cora Lea Bell

The burning cathedral of the summer

  photo by Barbara Thistle   Cape May New Jersey   “I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.  My bank of wild grass is majestic  and full of music.  It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.” –  Violette Leduc   It is 94 degrees here this afternoon, with a

What Kind of Times are These

Edge of the Forest II 1997  Damian Elwes     Here’s a gripping poem by Adrienne Rich:   What Kind of Times Are These BY ADRIENNE RICH There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

Everyone’s Gone to the Moon

Fifty years ago today , human beings landed on the moon. I wrote a poem about it, sort of,  but many years later:     Everyone’s Gone to the Moon   Rousseau painted the gypsy sleeping under the full moon in dazzling deep cobalt sky , dreaming face like a totem serene in a dream

Leave the dishes

painting by Andrea Kowch   Someone on Facebook posted this poem by Louise Erdrich, and I love it: “Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl

I am but summer to your heart

Vincent Romero:  Woman with cloth in sunlight     Here’s a lovely sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay:   “I know I am but summer to your heart, And not the full four seasons of the year; And you must welcome from another part Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear. No gracious

Lake Windermere in the summer

Here’s a poem by William Wordsworth: “Bright was the summer’s noon when quickening steps Followed each other till a dreary moor Was crossed, a bare ridge clomb, upon whose top Standing alone, as from a rampart’s edge, I overlooked the bed of Windermere, Like a vast river, stretching in the sun.” –  William Wordsworth, Summer Vacation,

Summer calls us all to praise

  Here’s a wonderful poem by Richard Wilbur   “Obscurely yet most surely called to praise, As sometimes summer calls us all, I said The hills are heavens full of branching ways Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead; I said the trees are mines in air, I said See how the sparrow burrows in