Spring, When Living a Long Time in One Place
After Galway Kinnell’s When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
When you have lived a long time in one place,
you know where the red buds of trees first appear in spring.
Look north, to the dividing windbreak on the property line
where the logging road is overgrown and abandoned.
When you have lived a long time in your home,
the return of phoebes means welcoming valued friends,
reclaiming their nest in the shed again where babies thrived,
fledged, and graced the sky with light-gray wings.
When you have lived a long time on your land,
prepare the vegetable garden once again.
Greet the daffodils return, the crocus and snowdrops.
Watch green returning to the thawing ground.
When you look skyward where you have lived a long time,
memories linger of ancient sugar maples, taken down years ago.
Shadowy ghosts of their autumn crowns, spiral flight of winged seeds.
Taste of syrup made long ago. Taps now rusted, wasting in the shed.
When you have walked a long time on your land,
you know where your many dead pets rest,
ground made more hallowed with each addition,
sacred with shed tears and longing.
When you have lived a long time in your home,
you cherish the ground’s blessings of fireflies,
blueberries, flowers of peony and iris. Perennials
that emerge yearly regardless of the land’s custodian.
When you have lived a long time in one place,
the day will come when the last pet is buried,
the final flowers gathered. Your departure, too,
inevitable, from where you lived a long time.
Barbara Ann Lemoine
Plate Tectonics
Everything is shifting now,
I feel the heat rising hot.
Volcanic ash in orange streams of basaltic lava
moltens earth up where slabs retreat back.
But we forge ahead as if the grounds
beneath us weren’t folding in on themselves.
Is this not the natural order of all ecologies?
In our constant striving towards creation comes
a subterranean rumble that
in equal measure,
must destroy.
Kristen Margaret Dearborn