Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Monday, December 3, 2012
Plotting the Resurrection
PLOTTING THE RESURRECTION
Old,
too long Brooks raincoat,
little,
round wool hat, galoshes...
as
years went by there was something
comical, yet touching about Katharine's
gray
appearance on this one day
in
the fall she got herself up for laying out
the
spring bulb garden.
With
diagram and clipboard in hand
she
waddled to the director's chair-
a folded canvas thing placed for her
at the
edge of the plot where she sat
hour
after hour, in wind and weather
as
Henry produced dozens of brown bags
full of new bulbs and a basketful
of
old ones ready for the intricate interment.
Small,
hunched over figure absorbed
in the
implausible notion
there
would, indeed, be another springtime
with its pinks and greens and yellows,
oblivious to the end of her own days,
she
knew perfectly well was near at hand...
there
she sat with her detailed chart
beneath dying October skies
plotting the resurrection.
Betty Spence
Mobile, Alabama
* Poem found in E.B. White's introduction to his
wife's book,
Onward and Upward in the Garden.
Ivy Wild
Ivy Wild
Grandmother's screened-in-porch was ivy-bound.
The way she pinned green
leaves to the screen
you would have thought them tresses of the sun.
She had such heart spun ways of doing things-
with silver ropes of hair let down for love
she used
hairpins to pin the glory up.
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
Every day now
the journey-bound
hickory-
in flower before leafing out-
opens another, another,
and still another
gold-tasseled
package.
Playing pendulum
with catkins as tufted
as a young man 's chin,
the gifted tree
going green in its gold
leaves me to write
thank-you notes.
Nesting Laughing Gull
In clump
of shoreline grass
a speckled green egg
swings gently
to the lub-a-dub sounds
of laughter on the wing.
*Poems in Avocet by Betty Spence
Seeding the Mstery
Time of Singing
A Magazine Of Christian Poetry
Volume 37 Number 3
Winter 2010/2011
SEEDING THE MYSTERY
(The tomato is celebrated in legends of romance as an apple of love.)
The winter of your dying past,
it's time to seed the tomatoes.
As memory would have it,
I find you in the potting shed.
I watch through the window
as you make small drain holes
in the bottom of Styrofoam cups
and pour in a measure of potting soil
every bit as promising as desire.
The fierce grip that once operated
bulldozers with tires as tall as cars
now let go,
you moisten the tip of a work-strutted
finger, touch it to your tongue
and pick straight up a small brownish-red seed
as dry and springy as a speck of dust
and drop in a womb-like cup
an embryo embedded
with a replica of love apples
heavy with summer-sweet flesh.
Betty Spence
Mobile, Alabama
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