SPRING is here at last- that seemed like a very long winter to me – and to you ?? Bees are buzzing, weeds are growing, lawnmowers humming – that’s this happy month of May. This morning I was walking through a field and remembered (thank you for the poetry course, Jacqueline Suskin, Every Day is a Poem) that I should aim to see awe in everything then attribute my very own sacred thought to that thing. I saw bright yellow buttercups, brilliant blue speedwells and now gone over cowslips. All that took me right back to my early childhood, swinging on a gate overlooking a field so I had to race home to write a poem:
NATURE STUDY
Time was
we passed our summer days
willing the cream to separate
to settle into clots of butter
golden as the meadow by the stream
knee-deep in buttercups
the meadow with the lichen-smothered gate
we swung above long grass
grass gleaming
as if newly waxed
where shires grazed by night
the shires whose fetlock feather
we would comb and comb
to lustrous sheen
while they stood quiet
mouse-velvet muzzles deep
in nose-bags
searching there for oats.
Or spying in a greening pool
and trailing double ropes of toad spawn
home in jars
impatient
for the Spring and tadpole hatch.
Although we never strayed
beyond the boundary hedge
from May’s white froth of blossom
through to dark December thorns
we learnt from nature
what we might expect from life:
some things will happen
some will not.
END
Give it a try – your poem would be completely different. Do email it to me.
Bye for now, Françoise Montgomery