Vernal Solo

by Sarah Bailey

found here:  http://www.catapultmagazine.com/issues/alone/posts/vernal-solo

The trees,

like dancing eyed girls,

have dressed themselves

in white and pink.

In the lawn

a seedling forest grows --

maple samara spun and sprouted.

A runner of green expectation 

blankets the sidewalk.

Once again, I

wield a broom

sweeping seeds from the

barren cement.

Inevitably,

some will stick to my shoe.

My hands still smell like soil

by Erin Tuttle

found here:  http://www.catapultmagazine.com/issues/alone/posts/my-hands-still-smell-like-soil

My hands still smell like soil

             only because today,

I planted Swiss chard

and beets

and others in the spinach family.

I scattered composites:

buttercrunch

bietina

romaine.

And I learned that longday onions

(family:  Amaryllis)

grow in cooler climates, so

if you want a Vidalia, better settle

for a Walla Walla.

Then there's Brassicaceae,

kohlrabi and kale and

Chinese cabbage.

But you wouldn't know

because you only helped me the first season,

          (back when I knew nothing)

when the landlord wouldn't let us dig, so

we gathered buckets and dresser drawers from the alleys,

filled them with soil and seeds.

The neighbor woman watched us from her window and wrote poems

because she wanted to fall in love

like us, with earth lines on her knuckles, and rain

warm and misty,

setting seeds to bed better than any fancy hose-head.

But what I had to learn (and this was harder

than remembering that tomatoes

are a member of the nightshade family, or

that a potato is a stem, or that a pumpkin handle

is called a peduncle)

            what I had to learn

was that healing hides in years

of filing the pea packets in the folder marked Fabeaceae,

and in February afternoons spent bent over 

trays of earth, breathing peat 'til I sneeze, 

feeling lonely and complete all at once.

High Flight

by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee

No 412 Squadron RCAF

killed 11 December 1941

found here:  http://mkpalos.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/high-flight/

Oh!  I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds -- and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence.  Hov'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew --

And while, with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untresspassed sanctity of space

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

The Lanyard

by Billy Collins

found here:  http://donmilleris.com/2009/05/10/a-poem-for-mothers-day/

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send me into the past more suddenly--

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips 

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that's what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim, 

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I repliked,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones, and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now

is a smaller gift--not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Ode on Dictionaries

by Barbara Hambly

A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page

     one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge

begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk,

    one of my mother's favorite words, hard knock

clerk of cliches that she is, at the moment going ape

    the current rave in the fundamentalist landscape

disguised as her brain, a rococo lexicon

    of Deuteronomy, Job, gossip, spritz, and neocon

ephemera all wrapped up in a pop burrito

    of movie star shenanigans, like a stray Cheeto

found in your pocket the day after you finish the bag,

    tastier than any oyster and champagne fueled fugue

gastronomique you have been pursuing in France

    for the past four months.  This 82-year-old's rants

have taken their place with the dictionary I bought

    in the fourth grade, with so many gorgeous words I thought

I'd never plumb its depths.  Right the first time, little girl,

    yet here I am still at it, trolling for pearls,

Japanese words vying with Bantu in a goulash

    I eat daily, sometimes gagging, sometimes with relish,

kleptomaniac in the candy store of language,

    slipping words in my pockets like a non-smudge

lipstick that smears with the first kiss.  I'm the demented

    lady with sixteen cats.  Sure, the house stinks, but those damned 

mice have skedaddled, though I kind of miss them, their cute

    little faces, the whiskers, those adorable gray suits.

No, all beasts are welcome in my menagerie, ark

    of inconsolable barks and meows, sharp-toothed shark,

OED of the deep ocean, sweet compendium

    of candy bars--Butterfingers, Mounds, and M&Ms--

packed next to the tripe and gizzards, trim and tackle

    of butchers and bakers, the painter's brush and spackle,

quarks and black holes of physicists' theory.  I'm building 

    my own book as a mason makes a wall or a gelding

runs round the track--brick by brick, step by step, word by word,

    jonquil by gerrymander, syllabub by greensward

swordplay by snapdragon, a never-ending parade

    with clowns and funambulists in my own mouth, homemade

treasure chest of tongue and teeth, the brain's roustabout, rough

    unfurler of tents and trapezes, off-the-cuff

unruly troublemaker in the high church museum

    of the world.  O mouth--boondoggle, auditorium,

viper, gulag, gumbo pot on a steamy August

    afternoon--what have you not given me?  How I must

wear on you, my Samuel Johnson in a frock coat,

    lexicographer of silly thoughts, billy goat,

X-rated pornographic smut factory, scarfer

    of snacks, prissy smirker, late-night barfly,

you are the megaphone by which I bewitch the world

    or don't as the case may be.  O chittering squirrel,

ziplock sandwich bag, sound off, shut up, gather your words

    into bouquets, folios, flocks of black and flaming birds.

Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle

by John Updike

The celebrated windows flamed with light

directly pouring north across the Seine;

we rustled into place.  Then violins

vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,

seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,

bit by bit, the vigor from the red,

the blazing blue, so that the listening eye

saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes

of shield and cross and strut and brace, that held

the holy glowing fantasy together.

The music surged; the glow became a milk,

a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed

until our beating hearts, our violins

were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead.