The author lives on a small farm (www.bitofearthfarm.com) with her family. Her poems have recently appeared in Atlantic Review, Christian Science Monitor, Mannequin Envy, Flashquake and Dirty Napkin. Her book Free Range Learning is due out from Hohm Press in June 2010. Visit her at www.lauragraceweldon.com
Spring Equinox
Road gray snow piled
along the parking lot
melts in rivulets
streaming between cars and carts
with the same eagerness I smell in the warming air.
Inside, displays are piled high
with bags of sterilized soil, compounds
in bright spray bottles, plants overflowing
small plastic pots.
I think of wise ones teaching
that answers await us.
Sorrel, plantain, dandelion
grow at our feet. Instead we tend a weed
serving nobody. We clear wild places
where graceful pollinators fed and
sleeping creatures dreamed. We confine what grows,
wondering why our children no longer pretend.
Sun-lit windows cast light across faces in checkout lines 1 to 9.
A gray-haired man hoists a sack of peat moss to his shoulder,
muscles cording his skin. A baby sleeps in a cart laden
with orange and purple petunias, bought too soon to plant.
Tags flutter ceremoniously over the head of a woman
carrying a shovel out the door.
The impulse to welcome spring
lies deep as memory. My pulse catches with unexpected love
for each person here. Now in the marketplace and later,
our hands tucking tender seedlings into blessed ground,
I see the many ways we are called to worship.
Why We Walk the Dogs
Yawning, you say you’re too tired
yet we can’t refuse
brown-eyed pleading at the door.
Away from these walls we more easily silence
sorrow, hardship, loss
by looking, only looking.
Cows in the lower pasture raise their heads as we pass.
A Baltimore oriole alights on a hickory fencepost
twined with yellow flowers. The sun stretches
generous arms of light cloud to cloud.
The old dog walks alongside,
as the puppy bounds through ditches
up hillsides, joyously muddy
collecting scents for his dreams.
When grief or fear catches in my throat
I remember to look at the sky
letting higher possibilities
hover over our steps.
Then, through evening brightness
dozens of blue and green dragonflies
swoop around us in some unknown ritual.
We wonder which of nature’s perfect gestures---
migration, mating, defense---this may be.
Standing in the middle of our complicated lives,
we feel a lift of hope requiring no effort
and turn toward home, wide awake.
