Easter

The first forsythia;
daffodils;
gorse or whins or furze
on hills,

in hedges.
Late winter aconite;
dandelions; primroses
challenging the light

of Easter morning.
The lesser Celandine;
a yellow fertilizer
bag define

spring in our steps.
I love my children
and my wife.
Rise all again and again.

--Peter Fallon (1951- ), Irish poet and editor

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled, 

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle, 

Or a wizened aster in late September, 

I brought her back in again 

For a new routine-- 

Vitamins, water, and whatever 

Sustenance seemed sensible 

At the time: she'd lived 

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer, 

Her shriveled petals falling 

On the faded carpet, the stale 

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves. 

(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.) 

 The things she endured!-- 

The dumb dames shrieking half the night 

Or the two of us, alone, both seedy, 

Me breathing booze at her, 

She leaning out of her pot toward the window. 

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me-- 

And that was scary-- 

So when that snuffling cretin of a maid 

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can, 

I said nothing. 

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week, 

I was that lonely.

-- Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) American poet and teacher,  winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1954, for The Waking, two-time National Book Award winner

Lines to a Nasturtium (A Lover Muses)

Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,

I saw a daring bee, today, pause, and soar,
Into your flaming heart;
Then did I hear crisp, crinkled laughter
As the furies after tore him apart?
A bird, next, small and humming,
Looked into your startled depths and fled . . .
Surely, some dread sight, and dafter
Than human eyes as mine can see,
Set the stricken air waves drumming
In his flight.

Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,
I cannot see, I cannot hear your flutey;
Voice lure your loving swain,
But I know one other to whom you are in beauty
Born in vain:
Hair like the setting sun,
Her eyes a rising star,
Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon, bar
All your competing;
Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,
Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet.
Ah, how the sense reels at my repeating,
As once in her fire-lit heart I felt the furies
Beating, beating.

-- Anne Spencer (1882-1975), African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance, librarian, civil rights activist, and gardener.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

----Louise Gluck (1943- ), American poet, and teacher, US Poet Laureate 2003,  awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2020. Poem from The Wild Iris, 1992.

Aftermath

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.

--Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet, essayist, translator, and teacher

Scripture reference: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Evening

The light passes 
from ridge to ridge, 
from flower to flower— 
the hepaticas, wide-spread 
under the light 
grow faint— 
the petals reach inward, 
the blue tips bend 
toward the bluer heart 
and the flowers are lost.

The cornel-buds are still white, 
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots—
black creeps from root to root, 
each leaf 
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.

--H. D. (1886-1961), Angle-American poet

Sonnet

I had not thought of violets late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet 
In wistful April days, when lovers mate 
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet. 
The thought of violets meant florists' shops, 
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine; 
And garish lights, and mincing little fops 
And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines. 
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed, 
I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams; 
The perfect loveliness that God has made,— 
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams. 
And now—unwittingly, you've made me dream 
Of violets, and my soul's forgotten gleam.

--Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935), biracial American poet, teacher, suffragette, activist, and editor

Much in Little

Amid the iris and the rose,
The honeysuckle and the bay,
The wild earth for a moment goes
In dust or weed another way.

Small though its corner be, the weed
Will yet intrude its creeping beard;
The harsh blade and the hairy seed
Recall the brutal earth we feared.

And if no water touch the dust
In some far corner, and one dare
To breathe upon it, one may trust
The spectre on the summer air:

The risen dust alive with fire,
The fire made visible, a blur
Interrate, the pervasive ire
Of foxtail and of hoarhound burr.

--Yvor Winters (1900-1968), poet and teacher, observer of life in California

Ah! Sunflower!

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

-- William Blake (1757-1827), English artist, poet, engraver and mystic

Two Voices in a Meadow

              A Milkweed
Anonymous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of the burst pod.
What power had I
Before I yearned to yield?
Shatter me, a great wind:
I shall possess the field.

              A Stone
As casual as cow-dung
Under the crib of God,
I lie where chance would have me
Up to the ears in sod.
Why should I move? To move
Befits a light desire.
The sill of Heaven would founder,
Did such as I aspire.

--Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), from The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses, 2016

Milkweed and stones, Windridge Solitude Retreat Center, June 26, 2017.

The Meeting

He was looking at a flower,

Not with love, but looking at it;

His plough was stopped in the top corner

Of a field he had just roofed.

There was nothing to say that the wind,

Repeating in a tree the unrecorded

Facts of history, had reached further

Than the cold porches of his ear.

He was looking at a flower,

As an animal looks, wondering nothing

About the mystery of its growth.

And why should he? He had grown, too.

With less beauty? Who is to say?

There was a likeness in his eyes,

In both their tenancies of the air’s

Quietness. You could have passed

On the hill road, unsuspecting

That blank encounter in space-time

Of two creatures, each with its load

Of meaning not to be set down.

--R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet and Anglican priest

The Burning of Yellowstone

Squaring their papers--tap, tap-- the news team finds
one last feature to catch St. Louis ears
following days of rage and roar on the screen
as feather, fur, nest, cave, hide disappears.
"Don't miss the sunset tonight or tomorrow night!"
For two thousand miles, it appears, wind bore to the eye
smoke from unseen deaths and wounds to remind us
how beautiful, at the end, is the earth, the sky.
Driving west from the towers that block our view
we find a hillside pull-off. Every sense
confounded by the vision that wraps us round,
we feel to the bone its burning radiance.
Orange daylily uncurls its lips and presses
them urgently on the blue-veined brow of space.
Rose at its ripest spreads wide its fervent petals
to welcome the other hues. An intense trace
of crushed violet scent lies on the air.
Petunia tongues a pink both sweet and clear.
Fallout of deep red peony litters the treeline.
We take each other's hand, eyes wet, and hear
how gently the wind informs its witnesses,
as jonquil yellow trumpets a floral boom,
of its debt to the artistry of their beholding,
of their culpability for its final bloom.

--Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004), US poet laureate 1992, in Poetry magazine, February 1990

In 1988, over 200 fires broke out in Yellowstone due to extremely dry conditions. A narrative of that years' fires can be found here: https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/yellowstone-ablaze-fires-1988.
Photo by Steve Henry of the National Park Service.

The Lent Lilly

‘Tis spring; come out to ramble
The hilly brakes around,
For under thorn and bramble

About the hollow ground
The primroses are found.
And there’s the windflower chilly
With all the winds at play,
And there’s the Lenten lily
That has not long to stay
And dies on Easter day.

And since till girls go maying
You find the primrose still,
And find the windflower playing
With every wind at will,
But not the daffodil,

Bring baskets now, and sally
Upon the spring’s array,
And bear from hill and valley
The daffodil away
That dies on Easter day.


-- A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

in time of daffodils (who know

in time of daffodils (who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why, remembering how
in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so (forgetting seem)
in time of roses (who amaze
our now and here with praise)
forgetting if, remember yes
in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek (forgetting find)
and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me

-- e e cummings (1894-1962)

Musical setting of this poem by Stephen Sametz, sung by Chanticleer.

To See the World in a Grain of Sand

To See the World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

-- William Blake (1757-1827)

Daffodils

I wander'd lonely as a cloud
    That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
    A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
    And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
    Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
    Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
    In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
    In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
    Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

--William Wordsworth (1770-1850)