When red hides behind pink
I don’t know what to think.
Where leaf is silver-plated
I am sadly addlepated.
Where are words to say
what eyes to brain convey?
Such elegance of hue
fills me with writer’s rue.
More thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
Monthly Archives: July 2017
Connections: July 27.17
A frilly dot of marigold
a snip of lemon thyme
a dainty plume of tarragon
phlox snow at fragrant prime
radiant brown-eyed Susans
Rudbeckia at the crown:
smallness revels in itself
sans the world’s renown.
Connections: July 25.17
When July heat breaks
and it’s good to be alive
Coreopsis taps her toes
and dances with the chive.
Connections: July 24.17
Maybe you remember
my Christmas tree mishap
when it toppled over
and flattened carpet nap.
Family ingenuity
perhaps aesthetics-free
brought it back to standing
with pragmaticality.
And now my poor tomato
bowed by wind and rain
lists like my old tree
risking break and sprain.
So whether Yule tradition
or heavy-laden vine
when the question comes from listing
the answer comes from twine.
Connections: July 23.17
Austere and pallid
graceful hew
stilled and flowing
pas de deux.
Many more thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives
to sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld
and to the Newport News (VA) Public Art Foundation.
Connections: July 22.17
The impatiens on the screened porch
are spluttering, soaked and indignant,
protesting the face full of rain
blasted by winds unbenignant.
You’d think all the thundering torrents
would make this rank air feel better
but the impatiens will attest to the fact
it just gets wetter and wetter.
Connections: July 20.17
Marigolds at twilight
border of hot coals
fevered daytime’s embers
garden’s molten shoals.
Connections: July 14.17
It’s an earthen air
sagging over the dawn
musty
sweating on the lawn
popping with toadstools
and yesterday’s rain sits still
gathering the scent of soil
and a nameless farmer’s till
ghosts of crops past
rain-wafted now
old farms unburied
by summer storm plow
smells of wet summer
airy thick soup
fragrant toothsome
morning droop.
Connections: July 12.17
The aging gardener
captured here
tells the story
loud and clear:
sunburn, sweat
arthritic knee
callous, puncture
sting of bee
ideas spawned
by maniac
with creaking
sacroiliac
swollen knuckle
blackened nail
back and shoulder
growing frail
in love of plants
all too transparent
oft perceived
as blithe aberrant
and yet withal
a kind of glow
why is that?
who can know?
More thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
Connections: July 11.17
When July comes out to play,
bouncing on trampoline leaf,
climbing monkey bar stems,
sliding down the smooth
shiny pepper,
cartwheeling,
hopscotching,
hide-and-seeking in
herb tunnels,
and no one knows
how green the world can be
until the hot light leap-frogs
over itself
and we wish we could snatch it
this limpid summer air
but
unpossessable
it mocks
catch me if you can!
like childhood,
then does the garden dapple
make us stop
to fetch a memory.
Oddments 