A September poem for Theresa's challenge, even though it is no longer September.  

 This poem came by way of a text from my sweet friend who had read it and thought I would like it as well.  I did.  I do.  It made me think back on a month that is largely a blur to me, a month I would normally have savored well, had the circumstances been different.  

My Army son has been here.  "I have been shooting a lot," I told him.  (photography) "You aren't writing as much though," he remarked.  It's true.  Partly it is because there aren't words for all that has happened in my heart these past few months. When they do come they either choke up in my throat or come spilling out, tumbling over one another leaving me dizzy with the emotion.

We buried my mother in September.  

Surely other things happened.  So many things.  School started.  Football and soccer games were won and lost.  The trees began to turn.  The rain came once more to these dry foothills.  Days filled up with activity, one after another, and tended to pass in a stream of consciousness manner, and so it has been quiet here.

When Rebecca sent me this poem though I thought of one September evening when I truly stopped and felt the damp late summer grass brushing my legs and watched my daughter brush errant strands of hair from her sweaty brow as she rested on the edge of her grandparents' corn crib. The mosquitos hummed. Tendrils of grapevine coiled up on empty vines. Moments like those get you through Septembers like this.

I love that she knew this and makes sure I am doing just that. 

Storing September

(a poem by Elizabeth Rooney)

You ask me what I did today.
I could pretend and say,
"I don't remember."
But no, I'll tell you what I did today–
I stored September.
Sat in the sun and let the sun sink in,
Let all the warmth of it caress my skin.
When winter comes, my skin will still remember
The day I stored September.

And then my eyes–
I filled them with the deepest, bluest skies
And all the traceries of wasps and butterflies.
When winter comes, my eyes will still remember
The day they stored September.

And there was cricket song to fill my ears!
And the taste of grapes
And the deep purple o f them!
And asters, like small clumps of sky…
You know how much I love them.
That's what I did today
And I know why.
Just simply for the love of it,
I stored September.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

Wendall Berry 

We read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner last Monday.  Just for fun.  I had started reading it alone and got so caught up in it I began to read aloud.  My friend and editor Theresa Thomas who had also shared poetry last week suggested a challenge, that we share a bit of poetry close to our hearts each Monday.  

As political debates heat up in the news and even among friends and neighbors a bit of despair can creep into our hearts late at night, wondering how this or that will all play out – for us, for our children. This piece reminds me how to meet that worry. 

"There is no peace that cannot be found in the present moment." – Tasha Tudor