Weeds Don’t Cry

Weeds don’t cry.

They stand stalwart 

in fields of corn,

in precise gardens of boxwood and lavender,

in chummy closeness with thyme and sage.

Then someone will shout:

“Pull up those damn weeds,”

and hands of all ages 

will strain against the  strength 

of those orphans of wildness and 

pull, pull, pull, 

or put foot to spade and

slice down to clear the root. 

In my salad days,

I pulled up sheaves of five foot tall

lamb's quarters to feed the breeder pigs. 

Lamb’s quarters, dandelion, amaranth, clover -

they grew between the crops and the rocks,

nourishing the pigs till the corn came in.

Someone once told me

that I was a weed - 

resilient, strong, able to flourish

in adverse conditions.

And I carried that thought 

throughout my life,

and felt proud ….

For when someone tells you that,

you never forget it. 

After years of garden work,

here’s how I feel about weeds:

I love them.

Kneeling in the middle

of  my tomato plants, 

I am contemplative and peaceful

as my reedy hands pull and pull and pull,

piling up the weeds of my past,

each a remembrance, 

an homage to enduring.

© Evie Safran, 2017

Men with picks and hoes clearing weeds in a field
Pullenvale, 1889
Photo held by John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Gravity

The footway we walk sketches brown 

lines on green fields that seem to hover 

over the Irish Sea. All around us sheep 

and cows hold their mouths to grass, 

unmindful of heaven. This perpetual path 

traces cliffs, cuts into rock, curdles to mud, 

descends onto beaches of rock draped in 

laver fronds, home to codling and flounder. 

Kelp, clams, fishermen, children who 

splash and swim, all know the sea’s routine. 

Even Annie the cab driver knows the tidal 

ways: in out in out days nights unending. 

It’s the far away sun and the pale moon.

We are new to this isle, walk the age-old 

ring around it, study a chart of days in May 

till we know the minute sea rise hits 

its highest, sinks to its lowest on the shores 

of Moelfre, Cemaes, Red Wharf Bay, and 

Puffin Island where rats have captured the roost.

Under May’s full moon water surges 23 feet, 

then falls away, a film rewound to its start.  

When the shore goes dry, tide pools become

small seas. People throw sticks, dogs bound out 

on a shimmering beach. Boats sit askew with

nothing to do. We walk the expanse of sand, 

sink into rivulets still flowing back to the sea. 

It’s the far away sun and the pale moon,

silence of unseen forces,

unremitting.

© Marti Snell, 2017

Traeth Mawr begins to emerge as the waters ebb
Photo by Eric Jones
from Wikimedia Commons

Conversation with a Hermit Thrush

A hermit thrush sang 

on the 12^th of March,

off stage,

twenty-five feet into the woods.

An introductory note, 

softly drawn

and then,

dismissing gravity,

he tossed little bells 

in an upward cascade 

into the needles of the pine

where they dissolved.

Hey, Thrush, I heard that.

That’s your spring song. 

You sang too early.

Your part starts in April.

What are your fellow-choristers

to think?

You’ll notice 

that the pine warbler came in 

exactly on the proper beat –

the first of March.

From high in the pine grove,

his disciplined trill 

introduced the whole piece.

And following a few measures later

on the second of March - 

or was it the third -

the phoebe entered on cue, 

raspy, 

as though a miniature wire brush were lodged in his throat.

So, Thrush,

what do you think you’re doing?

You can’t just start singing

whenever you want.

Can’t you hear you’re out of sync?

You come in 

when your part blends with all the other singers -

when the red-eyed vireo’s lilting voice teases from the treetops,

when the rose-breasted grosbeak,

in full blossom, 

gargles with a throat of liquid sunshine. 

You enter

just a few measures before your cousin, the wood thrush, 

returns to its summer haunts. 

Your voice can hardly compete with the arpeggios and trills

that the summer thrush flings throughout the forest. 

That’s your cue to fly north.

Why then, Thrush, do you sing out of turn in early March?

Is it because you need to ripple, massage, stretch, empower

the cords that will give life to your music?

Does this send a shiver through your body 

that casts off the chill of winter,

and readies you for your moment six weeks hence? 

Does this affirm that you are a singer,

a splendid singer, a yearning singer,

and that you know your time is coming?

I can understand that.

  © Jennifer Gaden, 2017

Hermit Thrush
Photo by CheepShot
from Wikimedia Commons

Math for Girls Counts

Before they were great, great grandmothers, they stood 

in lines for singular equality, for one scale blind 

to gender, creed or color. But, their right 

to vote was delayed until 1920 – 144 years after

propertied White men, 51 years after Black men,

as if women were mere household amenities

used as conveniences.

The vote hoped to move the line closer 

to a public voice in fiscal and sexual values,  

but it took sixteen more years to change 

birth control info from obscene 

to legal mail (hidden in plain brown envelopes)

to head-of-the-household husbands,

a married man the only 

Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. 

Connecticut’s 1965 defeat freed the pill 

only for the sanctified wedded. I remember 

unmarried, pregnant girls, 

shamed and blamed for bad choices, 

while the boys were just being boys. 

The 1982 ERA defeat subtracted sixty years 

of female rights. One hundred years since suffrage,

fifteen states still have not ratified ERA,

now a dusty museum piece. 

Defeat meant I had no credit, no bank account, 

no property without my husband’s name, addressed as 

Mrs. John Doe, my first name unimportant,

a nondescript dustpan beneath spousal steps.

Reduced fraction of 1973’s Roe vs. Wade, reproductive rights 

are not in the corporate equation that controls

choice as newly-deemed religious bodies, 

a catch-22 where working women have zero say. 

Despite the centuries-old male monopoly, women have 

done the math – equal means equal, not less than.

© Patsy Asunción, 2017

"The Awakening" by Henry Mayer, 1915
Restoration copyright by Adam Cuerden
from Wikimedia Commons 

The Warrior (or After Surgery)

Reluctantly, I force myself

to stand before the mirror,

stripped of all artifice,

naked except for earrings.

Reminded of a warrior after many battles,

I note the scar stretching 

from sternum to armpit,

fading now but marking

where once there was a breast.

I feel unbalanced, bereft,

but then I see the head,

eyes watchful,

able to enjoy color and form;

ears, somewhat large,

but able to hear bird-song and blues,

Beethoven and Brahms;

mouth, lopsided and quizzical,

but able to converse 

and even sing a bit.

The top of the skull

is covered by wispy, graying hair.

Within it is a brain

with thoughts and emotions, 

and most of all

the ability to enjoy,

to appreciate, and to love.

So I honor the gift of my Maker,

who made me in Her image,

and the gift of time

to enjoy Her creation a little longer.

© Peg Latham,  1993

Mrs. Prince, after surgical removal of a breast
Watercolor of a woman operated on for breast cancer, 1841
from Wikimedia Commons
via Wellcome Images

Grooming the Herd in Spring

Beneath these gloved hands

Cowhide on horsehide inseparable

The winter coats fly off in tufts

Revealing the darker the sleeker

The more radiant summer skin.

Down flanks rubbing dried mud

From hocks and fetlocks brushing

Botfly larvae from cannon bones

This heifer’s hide gives its all

In an anointing of earth to earth.

Tonight out in the eastern paddock 

They graze on in watery darkness

Invisible yet shining with a patina 

That only open-handed love knows

How to coax again when the rain 

and the new mud come.

© Bill Prindle, 2017

Arab Simeon Stud
Photo by Jimmy Baikovicius
from Wikimedia Commons

THE CHARLESTON MASSACRE, JUNE 2015

(For the nine church members in Bible study murdered by a white supremacist)

Streaming blood, the Bibles flap their wings;

Pages become wings, the wings of strong angels.

The Bibles spray blood over the listening Earth

Like words we must read in order to survive.

The blood is like the trail made by dazzling jets:

The Bibles rise like thrones into heralding heaven.

Each Bible is a throne bearing up a wise victim,

A martyr singing of love and mercy

High over horror, the sanctuary defiled

Once again befouled, violated

By a blank secessionist for the country of blankness

Testifying to hate’s supremacy.

The flag of blankness must be honored

By minds that are blank, giddy with pride

In rebellion against the human, despising all color.

They turn the beauty of the city into old sad sin,

Its crime against the Union of love and justice.

Hate’s flag will not be lowered; love’s flag bows in shame.

Blankness must recreate the Confederation of inhumanity—

The sanctuary of color, of life is refuted.

But the church of mercy has changed into a chalice,

A huge chalice filled with the blood of the killed.

The church brims with blood like the wine of kindness,

The redness of blackness, the color of love.

Even in victory, the unloving stay unloving—

Exposed to kindness, he must murder the kind.

But kindness is sustained on the wings of those bibles

And the church is a chalice offered to heaven,

The wine of wisdom, the oblation of souls.

Our Union must be preserved by love and mercy,

By courage and justice, the strength of the kind.

Blood streams from those Bibles

In words we must read:

We are one in diversity, naked Union of hope.

The fragile city is beautiful,

But its sins have been horrible.

It asks to be forgiven,

But it must not sin again.

May rainbow people thrive

In the joyous color of its markets;

May the pastel mild elegance

Of the city survive.

For blankness is loyal only to blankness

And will stay desolate forever

In evil isolation.

The Union of love and mercy, color with color,

Justice with kindness is never alone.

Honor the redness of blackness, honor all color,

Kindness and courage, the song of the strong.

Note: The terrorist Roof, who had no sheltering roof yet could not accept courteous sanctuary, despising all affectionately protective roofs, deceived himself into thinking he was aristocratic white. In fact, he was blank. Blankness is not a color. All color is lovely—black or white shining.  Roof believed in the supremacy of gunlove, the sovereignty of ignorance. He expected that his hopeless blankness would grant him pleasingly grim self-justification, the light of the loser. He thought the murderous refutation of otherness is power. With skill-less urgency, he would paint his blankness in blood, giving his blankness the insignia of specious superiority. But his blankness gets blanker and blander as long as he dourly dubiously lives. This is gunlove, the emptiness of solipsistic ignorant sovereignty. Roof is not white. He is blank. Clementa Pinckney and his studiously charming martyred friends, are victorious in establishing a better city of kindness and justice, equally and delicately pastel as the beauty of the older sinning city. The amiably raucous color of its market will live, will thrive even more.  Terror over the Earth is unreal murderous rule, fake law , the rage of blankness. Only the blood of love, of courage and kindness, knows how to paint soul, actual art. The reign of dearth and fear over the Earth kills but is idiot illusion. Earth is the loveliest of unmurderous hues, the true spectrum of you, of thou. Relinquish killing animals, grass, people. Unpoison the air.

Acknowledge the gorgeous, ensouling, reviving, healing flag of the rainbow. Race is not real. Life only is valid hope and possible power. The tears of good humans are real. Accept the thrill of otherness, your gifted and giving self, the life of thou and I—joy. Everything that exists in this shattered light is holy. For it has conquered nothingness. Gather the shattered light.

      © Stephen Margulies, 2017

Four winged angels
Stained glass by J. & R. Lamb Studios
Wikimedia Commons