Photo by Lapa Smile on Shutterstock
A City Dweller Dwells on Nature
(for Ola M. Dugan)
I read somewhere nature doesn’t matter
to city dwellers—not so, did you know
flowers appeared 140 million years ago
Tulips out-valued gold in some places
Orchids draw their nutrients from thin air
and flowers, they really do have powers—
when I was a young girl, Mrs. Meers
had a chairlift installed, her porch-gates
parted like the Red Sea to fit between
lifting stilts for the mechanism, while her
front yard, pasture green, got paved over
with white cement the sun baked and baked
but soon Artemisia, silver lime, Creeping
Phlox and Jenny grew clean out of cracks
in her white pavement and neighborhood kids
took to wandering an imagined mountain side
or ardent wood of Lilliputian trees and shrubs—
just weeks after Mrs. Meer’s chairlift came
Dad and friends on our block brought home
these planting-pots tortured out of spare
tires and plunked them in our front yards
I helped Mom and the other half-hearted
plant in them Impatiens, Dipladenia, Mom’s
Gallicas, their scent reaching the top step
where I took a rest, laughing as the women
joked about buying chairlifts and these ugly
old planting-pots being the first to go…
when they retired, Mom and Dad left me our
rowhouse and that spare-tire-turned-planting-pot
but Mom’s roses still taking root, pinks, purples,
reds, southern-sun yellows give it more value
than gold to me—along with several other
memory-makers that will always matter
A Spirit in the Woods
(for Julie L. Moore)
Tree of Heaven
smooth, hazel bark
one stout twig, heart-
shaped-leaf-scarred
pointing—convicts me
for times I dared to travel
soulless wonderless departing
arriving departing arriving
mind bare, face bland—but
a second chance naturally
follows the tenacious tree’s
dogged demand on my
attention, so I sandal-up
step outside the motel room
to see, listen, learn
early evening breeze
tempers July heat, I sit
among Little Lanterns
hedging the rocky curb
face a mountain range till
rugged blue ridges, milk-
mist waves of rounded
weathered peaks lure
thoughts down thirty-three
hundred feet towards
Mom’s Georgia woods
a ways from town, then off
the dirt road, and an
amble into Cousin George
Morrell’s healing garden
here her Grandad gathers
roots of Yarrow, Black-Eyed
Susans, Sourwood to mix
cure-alls from cough to croup
while a pretty girl, no clue
she’ll be my mother, uses
paints made out of berries
spectrums of Coreopsis
Dandelions, Morning Glories
Lilac to layer a pink and gold
on lavender sunrise—
and though she’s traded
pigtails for styles more
becoming hair grown
rain-cloud gray, she often
recalls what her woods taught—
the tranquility of snow-covered
trails, the calm of light blue
to violet Bellflowers, Foxglove,
Columbine with wild roses
sunning near the shears
the humble give of reeds
reaching past murky waters
bending westward into air
flaxen gold and burnt sienna
the very hues of the horizon
now framing my blue ridge
mountains’ slow retreat
leaving me a peace
deep at heart, and yet—a soul
full of awe and wonder at how
my mother’s Georgia woods
still shape their drifting face
Of Writing and Flying
beyond the sun’s sinking beyond evening’s edge
she makes remarkable the moment she almost
drowned in a lull of silence, silent as paper sounds
when one chances heights too high for writers
yet to earn real wings—
all disheveled, self-heavy, she could not fly, just
hovered then stalled over turbulent drafts, half-
thoughts before plunging into a whirl of muddle
pages on pages flooding her desk, no heart
nor story among them
this would’ve been her end had the wind not called—
rattling the window pane, a gust-like breathing
she began to listen for, until hearing what she thought
but could not name—now, writing processes
the writer, who trusts the breath that brings a humbler
heart back in sync with the mind’s slower sway
back to what strikes in her marrow as story
sure of the air’s goodness to lift her and whatever
she’s gathered of light, the writer records in allusions
to the colorful faith of Asters, in tones hopeful
as Sword Lilies, rhythms sharp as the flight feathers
of a mourning dove’s wings, in moods charitable
as the Iris, gentle as a Snowdrops’ tepals, the rise
of an artist from art’s anywhere, ready to soar
beyond the sun’s sinking beyond evening’s edge
on to understanding and song