June 2018

Earthdaughters

            by Jeanne LeBaron Sawyer

‟marsh marigolds”

                             she notes

as we round the corner by the brook

and in my head I hear a timeless chorus

my mother’s voice and mine joining hers

‟skunk cabbage!”

                            as we compile

the catalog of spring

Jeanne LeBaron Sawyer, librarian and dedicated amateur naturalist, wrote this poem in about 1985. Like almost all her poems it had never been published until the past decade, when Jeanne worked with her daughter, poet and editor Polly Brown, and with book designer Sarah Bennett, to produce a first book. Evolution: Poems Across Seven Decades was released by Heron Pond Press in 2017. Jeanne died in May 2018, at 90, leaving many memories of shared ‟bog joy,” as her grandchildren referred to it, and these poems.