Butterflies

Some days her main job seems to be

to welcome back the Red Admiral

as it lights on a leaf of the yellow

forsythia. It is her duty to stop & lean

over to take in how it folds & opens

its wings. Then, too, there is the common

Tiger Swallowtail, which seems to her

entirely uncommon in how it moves

about the boundaries of this clearing

we made so many years ago. If she leaves

the compost bucket unwashed to rescue

a single tattered wing from under the winter

jasmine or the blue flowers of the periwinkle

& then spends a whole afternoon at our round

oak table surrounded by field guides

& tea until she is sure—yes—that it belongs to

a Lorquin's Admiral, or that singular

mark is one of the great cat's eyes

of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell, then she is

simply practicing her true vocation

learning the story behind the blue beads

of the Mourning Cloak, the silver commas

of the Satyr Anglewing, the complex shades

of the Spring Azure, moving through this life

letting her sweet, light attention land

on one luminous thing after another.

 

Poem copyright ©2017 by Samuel Green, "Butterflies."  

I do my best to deliver an engaging and Deliberate telling of the good story of our beeing as I choose to say It
and how I Like Beeing among all the rest of you as you be
and I truly hope that Someday your being will want to Bee with me in our Beeing kind of world
And we can all expand our breathe along with the universe as it expands and breathes Within us and without us
and regardless of what we have to say about it.
And I talk about the Buddha and sometimes he is on the side of the road and sometimes she is upside down
and I am here to tell you that life can be strange and wonderful at the same time
and I write about Melanie and her help with my finding reality again
and my trip to the Yucatan with my two boys
and going to the movies as a ten year old
and the girls in my teen age life
and my father being tough as nails and stinging me with that
and my mother being so very vulnerable and leaving me with that
and then there is me learning how to Bee
in the here and now kind of moment and the alive kind of moment
and I do not want to leave out the music in my life and Miles Davis
and the Mayan Kings and a girl dressed in a Nurses outfit
And mostly I wrote this book to reveal myself to my wife and to my family and to anyone who Reads this book really
and I really want all of you to enjoy your beeing in the alive kind of world and of the right now in this moment kind of world.

Charles H. Grimes

Ann Arbor 2014

Militants to Certain Other Women

You who pass coldly by when the police rush upon us,
When they wrench away our banners,
(Beautiful banners whose colors cry a demand for liberty)
You who criticize or condemn
(Declaring you “believe in suffrage,
Worked for it in your state, and your mother
knew Susan B. Anthony”)
Can you think in terms of a nation?
Could you die, (or face ridicule) for your belief?
For the freedom of women, for your freedom,
we are fighting; 
For your safety we face danger, bear torture;
For your honor endure untellable insult.
To win democracy for you we defend the banners of democracy
Till our banners and our bodies
Are flung together on the pavement,
Waiting at the gates of government,
We have made of our weariness a symbol
Of women’s long wait for justice.
We have borne the hunger and hardship of prison,
To open people’s eyes
To men’s determination to imprison the power of women.
You women who pass coldly by,
Do you imagine your freedom is coming
As a summer wind blows over fields?
Slowly it has advanced by a sixty-years’ war,
(Those who have fought in it have not forgotten)

And that war is not won.
Strongly entrenched, the foe sits plotting.
Close to his lines our banners fly,
Signalling where to direct the fire,
Greater forces are needed, reserves and recruits.
Are you for winning or for waiting,
Women who watch the banners go down?
Women who say, “Suffrage is coming,”
While suffrage goes by you into Prussia?
Case to be content with applauding speeches, and praising politicians.
Patience is shameful.
Awake, rise, and act. 

Katharine Rolston Fisher - 1871-1949

This poem is in the public domain.

[we are]

we are
prayer in the long boat
                                               a rhizomatic scream
                                               surrounded by the dark dagger
                                                                        of the ocean
                         scripture
                         in its entirety
                         is anticipation of the lilt
                                                   and yet
there is no word
for the rhythm
             we endure
             across this dirtless moment
                                                    antibird, we sing like birds
                                                    textured and untrained
             rugged the love
             that claps
in the chasm of our black palms

Copyright © 2019 by Quenton Baker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 28, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Great Bear

When the day pours down in a silken glaze    the great bear walks up       and up each milk-white step of noon leaving the restless woods    and her green cave of weeds       emptying her pockets of berries, roots, and grubs climbing past the crows in the lemony air    above the hornbeam and chestnut oak       between cloud and mountain. She slowly shakes aside the heavy rug of her fur    and muscle of her body       letting go memories of grievous winters    boom and howl of the wind and weight       of each cub, before it was born wending up the stairs of the night chorus    into the embrace of grandmother sky,       with bones as light and fierce as polished suns. I tell you this so you won't be surprised    if the scent of pine sap drifts down       with milkweed, and memories of wild fat summers — if you too    are stretched out in the field watching       for the rise of the great mother. Remember your enchantment:    every day is a doorway       every moment is the world revealing itself. Death is not waiting at the end,    but is here, vibrating with promises       of wider horizons and songs in different languages. We are not waiting, but are    constant and becoming as we climb       listening for learning what the river wants    and how the plants became healers —       letting go of our bodies slowly, carrying nothing else into    the black and silver night       but the great shining we came from, and are.

Watched by crows and friend to salamanders, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She is the author of two full-length books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019), and Wolf Laundry (2020), and she has new poems out or forthcoming in American Writers Review, The Main Street Rag, Jam & Sand, The Writer’s Cafe Magazine, Cabinet of Heed, and Front Porch Review, among others.

Gwendolyn Brooks, "truth" from Blacks

And if sun comes How shall we greet him? Shall we not dread him, Shall we not fear him After so lengthy a Session with shade? Though we have wept for him, Though we have prayed All through the night-years— What if we wake one shimmering morning to Hear the fierce hammering Of his firm knuckles Hard on the door? Shall we not shudder?— Shall we not flee Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter Of the familiar Propitious haze? Sweet is it, sweet is it To sleep in the coolness Of snug unawareness. The dark hangs heavily Over the eyes.

Today is the birthday of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000).

If you would rise, then rise like the dawn sky
golden light seeping into your dreams, molasses slow and syrupy sweet
dawn rises in your chest like summer
blowing copal scented breath into your lungs
And painting your eyes in amber and gold
If you would dance, then dance with the morning
Twirl with the barely visible spirits that dance in flickers of flame and foxfire
Sing with the birdsong that ripples across the sky
Tell your memories to the eastern winds, carrying the stories of dawn
If you must invoke, then invoke the knowledge of the Eastern wind
To the knowledge, that once learned, changes everything
Invoke the light that calls the seed to unfurl, the flower to unfurl
If you must pray, then pray the prayers of sunflowers
Feet planted in black earth and face ever following the light
If you would enchant, then start with longing,
Drown under the song of the sirens and let longing seep from your skin like perfume
If you would be cleansed, then come at dawn and listen
For the sunrise is the song that renews, and illuminates
And all shadows must fall away from its rays
Until the night settles her skirts over the earth again

- The Green Witch's Homestead