It’s true; we are no strangers to the damp. According to local meteorologists, this waning season ranks as the fourth wettest summer since records for such details have been kept - generally, not the sort of record we value in our summers.

Yet, as we are reminded by this month’s poem (featured in Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio’s 2021 Plein Air chapbook), sometimes disappointment, loss, “sorrow” can transform, revealing a certain beauty - or silver lining - if we but look.

Ghost Pipe

by Lucinda Bowen

After another skyswell of rain, this morning the Medicine Wheel
is hosting a convocation of waters: Deep Earth Water seeps
through mud to greet her Air Water sisters Humidity and Rain, while cousin Mist
leans down from the treetops, breathless and thin.
In the sapling a song sparrow bathes in a sink of leaves,
and Dew Water tenders her fingers across his feathered young face.

In this flush season, a rush of mushrooms has
ushered to the surface, and in the copse of trees behind the wheel
the floor blooms with fungus. Like a desert after a summer storm, the mushrooms
have emerged abundant, pink-eared and glistening, to soak the sky:
thirsty constellations of spiky puffball, saprophytes, and slippery jack.

In the deepest treedark, a clutch of little wraith flowers
haunts the footprint of a stump. Translucent white, they look like breath condensed,
like cartilage or sorrow, something not meant to be seen on the outside of things.
Ghost pipe is a parasite that begs its sips of sun. It reminds us
that Water, when it washes over, does not always quench the sorrow.
Sometimes it blooms it.

Lucinda Bowen is a poet, writing group facilitator, chicken enthusiast, and in her spare time, a senior HR manager at a Boston-based e-commerce startup. This is her fifth year contributing to the Old Frog Pond plein air poetry chapbook.