Tag Archives: autumn

Seeing Love

Squished banana adornes the counter,
turning formica to quartz,
sparkling, innocence like the eyes of infants.

A vase is filled,
broccoli blooms buttery
and the cilantro bolts to corriander,
tiny white flowers like lace.
Stalks of swiss chard, their deep red veins
and ruffling green leaves stand supportive
at the bouquet’s back
and the mint waits to be noticed.

Headed for laundry, I pass through the kitchen,
wipe up the abandoned fruit
and wonder about the remaining scent unseen.

When my babies are grown, explorers in the wild world,
how will I see love?

Abundance surrounds
the cut herbs and harvested vegetables
like an aura in the full kitchen.
When the empty bedrooms gape,
radical gratitude must be my first nature.
Then the absence will be as abundance,
the overflow of my blessing cup.

Turning

Spaghetti squash lies in the October garden
beneath butter-yellow flowering broccoli.
Bees still visit, bright-stripped and fuzzy,
while cabbage white butterflies float over stem and stalk.

The earth waits to be turned,
the garlic cloves to be buried,
the leaves to be gathered, scattered and spread.
Our unpruned forsythia holds a bough of apple-red leaves proudly above the ground.

The night air has us under blankets now,
and we stretch, move, and breathe slowly in the dark mornings.
In this earthly life we grow and ripen, huddle and hibernate, take root and flourish,
turning, and turning, and turning toward the light.

An Ode on the Eve of Our Anniversary

Today’s clouds sit in the sky, scoops of ice cream
on glass tables.  On a tiny mountain top
we let our feast rest warm in our bellies, watch
our kids run wild

through the prairie grass.  The trees’ journey toward
winter deepens, leaves like flames flare along the
horizon, flash out of the dense green skyline.
Our season, shifting

within this sphere of space and time, we measure
love in actions; we count our growth rings on the
circumferences of memories.  We are
stories, closed curves combined.