Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

a July like this? Or were we always waiting for disasters? Watching the sky for tornados, locusts, dust clouds or smoke? Hiding in the shadows from the heat? Can we, even in our imaginations, conjure up this lazy summer afternoon? Will our children have any idea that such a thing ever existed?

by Susan Hartley Swett Read more about Was there ever

May and the Poet

There is May in books forever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May’s in Milton, May’s in Prior,
May’s in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer;

May’s in all the Italian books:—
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves, Read more about May and the Poets

Writing a recent piece referencing the town I grew up in, the phrase "pretty how town" popped into my head. Some see this poem as a negative picture of mid-century Middle American towns like mine. I see it as a cautionary tale.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

No Songs In Winter

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The sky is gray as gray may be,
There is no bird upon the bough,
There is no leaf on vine or tree.

In the Neponset marshes now
Willow-stems, rosy in the wind,
Shiver with hidden sense of snow.

So too 't is winter in my mind,
No light-winged fancy comes and stays:
A season churlish and unkind.

White Eyes

By MARY OLIVER

In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
shoves and pushes
among the branches.
Like any of us Read more about White Eyes

The first two verses will give you the gist of the thing. The rest spells out a Halloween night of the "merry, friendly, country-folks" in Scottish dialect, if you're up for the full adventure.

Halloween

Robert Burns - 1759-1796 Read more about Halloween

Walker Art Center
Minneapolis
Alexander Calder Exhibit

Just people, you know -
Their shapes and sizes
And the things they do
with their hands;
How they move their feet and fingers,
All crossed and stretched and
moving together;
The movement of faces,
lifting lips and eyebrows.
Nodding and turning.
The free-form people, you know.
They were all there.

Song Of Aragorn

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

J.R.R. Tolkien Read more about A Little Gold for August

This was written in the 1930's. I post it here for all the kids since then, from Ukraine to Uvalde and everywhere in between.

Kids Who Die

Langston Hughes Read more about Kids Who Die