June 2014
Tim Dickey’s Nails
by Marian Brown St. Onge
Marian Brown St. Onge retired seven years ago from her position as founding Director of the Center for International Partnerships and Programs at Boston College, where she also taught French and directed BC’s Women’s Studies Program. Her publications include more than twenty poems and several articles on women writers, cultural issues and topics in international education. Beyond her poetry, St. Onge is working on a biography of a World War II French Resistance fighter for which she received a Norman Mailer Fellowship award in 2009.
May 2014
Agnus Castus
by Cammy Thomas
Agnus castus, “chaste lamb,” long-limbed shrub
in my neighbor's yard. Known from antiquity, it lifts
its purple spears to the hummingbirds. The ocean
is not far, the air buzzing and salty, bees
from the hive up the hill buried in every bloom.
Chaste lamb, Abraham's balm, monk's pepper
from the Mediterranean, it visits this colder climate
to shake our frozen muscles and remind us
to stay pure. The bees may milk it, flavor their
honey with it, but for us, it's always upright.
Its leaves like hands, five on a bract,
a perfect, neutral green, a color-wheel
green, calm and plain. They shift in the wind
as the bees come off and resettle. The trunk
is slender and lit by low sun.
Could I grow this pure, this straight,
this beautifully colored, so effortlessly--
just the sun and there I would be, reaching
without striving, watered by a benevolent
spirit who can appear and disappear
while I remain rooted, extending
upward yearly from my fertile bed.
Cammy Thomas’ first book of poems, Cathedral of Wish, received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her second book, Inscriptions, will be out in October, 2014. Both are published by Four Way Books. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Appalachia, Bateau, The Classical Outlook, The Healing Muse, and Ibbetson Street Press #30. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and teaches English at Concord Academy.
April 2014
Picking Up Pinecones
by Mary Ruefle
I light a few candles, so
the moon is no longer alone.
My secret heart wakes
inside its draped cage
and cracks a song.
After a life of imagining,
I notice the ceiling.
It is painted blue
with a border of pinecones.
I’ve spent my life in a forest.
Picking up new things,
will it never end?
from Trances of the Blast, published by Wave Books, 2013
Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio is sponsoring a free public reading by Mary Ruefle, as she receives the 14th annual Robert Creeley Award on Wednesday, April 16 at 7:30 p.m. The reading is at the Dragonfly Theater, R.J. Grey Junior High, 16 Charter Road, Acton, MA.
Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including Selected Poems; A Little White Shadow; and Madness, Rack, and Honey. She is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award.
March 2014
To the Constant Season
Lunenburg, 2012
by Zachary Bos
Frost on the marsh grass this morning,
and a line of crows flying over.
Time for praising what fills the year
with transitoriness: the cold,
the scarcity of food, changing
in the angle of the sunlight;
for praising the iron cycles
the birds read as Time to move on;
for praising what makes the singing
of the music of the woods of
gladful songbird April nothing
like burnt October birdsong—like
the hink-hawnk of the coughing geese
enlarging and diminishing
as they come in vees and go, gone;
like the sound of the hawks leaving;
like clouds of straw-crowned chaffinches
alighting on branchtips, melting
into the brushwork of the bush
waiting hidden until duskfall
when they flock through the dark, going
to some elsewhere where they’ll be new
for a few days or weeks, passing
over or through, never staying,
never always here, always just
missed. Till… nearly here again. When
the lilacs bud bright again and
the beautiful birds, thank it all,
unmigrate, come back to unwatch
the constant burial of fall,
cover the skytop nakedness
with their numbers in returning.
Zachary Bos is a founder of Pen & Anvil Press, the publishing enterprise of the non-profit Boston Poetry Union. An alumnus of the graduate poetry program at Boston University, his poetry has appeared most recently in Bellevue Literary Review, Spare Change, Route 2, Oddball Magazine, and Found Magazine.
February 2014
Circling
by bg Thurston
Her belly is silent with colic, her legs stiff with age.
A ragged mane, half white, half brown sticks out
over a shaggy face, grey hair feathering her cheeks.
Her past unknown, she could be from Chincoteague—
the pinto pony I wished for when I was seven.
We walk in frozen circles, exhaling thick plumes.
Each time I stop, her legs crumple, her small body
thuds down on its side. Shrill nickers of pain escape.
I pour more soda and ginger down her throat.
The vet comes, shakes his head, injects Banamine.
I expect her gone by morning, but she’s there,
waiting at the fence for feed and hay and attention.
Her whiskery lips move over corners of the bucket
steaming with molasses, sliced carrots, and bran mash.
She snuffs at my pockets, hoping for more.
Published in The Wolf Head Quarterly, Summer 1998 Volume 4 -- Issue 3
The term “colic weather” refers to drastic temperature changes which can sicken horses.
After a career in high-tech, bg Thurston now lives on a farm in Warwick, Massachusetts. Her first book, Saving the Lamb, by Finishing Line Press was a Massachusetts Book Awards highly recommended reading choice in 2008. Her second book, Nightwalking, was released in 2011 by Haleys. Currently, she is writing the history of the 1780’s farmhouse she lives in. She teaches poetry workshops year-round, except in March when she is busy with lambing season.
January 2014
For Lola
by Lila Linda Terry
The orchard is asleep.
All the sweetness of the berries
driven deep in the ground
is alive in the frozen roots.
The warm juices are brewing even now
in deepest winter
under a cloak of white.
The farmer rests.
She can sleep in the morning
and doesn't watch the sky,
the soil, the pickers.
A frost does not matter.
She may allow herself a nap,
a crossword puzzle,
to read the pruning book.
She sits.
The world is white.
The night is deep.
Quiet presides.
Rest begets earnest labors.
The deepness of winter,
the crystalline icy night sky
will bring forth
summer’s rich sweetness.
Lila Linda Terry lives in Cambridge where she maintains a private practice in the healing arts. She is a certified Sage-ing leader and facilitates wisdom circles, groups which focus on cultivating wisdom from life experience. She grows a medicinal plant called the Light Root at Old Frog Pond Farm. She writes, "My hands are always busy...writing, healing, growing... This poem was written to honor a friend in the depth of New England winter."
December 2013
MOON TEA
by Polly Brown
In a dark car, before driving,
to keep myself awake
for getting home,
I pour tea
from a small thermos
into a small cup,
and it’s the reflected sky
(whitened
by a rising moon)
that rises up to greet me
as I pour,
as the cup fills.
It is the sky I drink.
Polly Brown taught young adolescents for many years, at Touchstone Community School in Grafton, Massachusetts, and now writes about the daily texture of progressive education, at ayeartothinkitover.com. Her poems have appeared at Terrain.org, and in Appalcachia, Sanctuary, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. She has two chapbooks: Blue Heron Stone, from Every Other Thursday Press, and Each Thing Torn From Any of Us, from Finishing Line Press.
November 2013
Consecration by Kirk Westphal
I am the fallen hemlock
beside the trail
with the dry rot pulp and moss breath
and the naked ribcage of my sins
spindling outward at incomplete angles
remembering the heavy lattice
of their green-black days.
Please, as you pass by,
break off one branch each day.
Snap them to the trunk,
in pieces if you must, leaving nothing
so that one day I may rest here
proud as a mainmast
or as the noble elegy
of some great spire.
By day, Kirk Westphal works on water supply plans around the world and has written many technical articles on water management. By night, he writes poetry, memoirs, and fiction. His poetry has appeared in Dunes Review, The Road Not Taken, National Public Radio, and the chapbook Lines in the Landscape. He is also the author of the book Ordinary Games, scheduled for publication in 2015.
September 2013 - Poetry at Old Frog Pond Farm
I am drawn to the farm as a place for inspired language. Songs and stories are an integral part of thelandscape and the events that take place here, and Linda, a poet herself, frequently combines poetry with her photographs and sculpture.
My first collaboration with Linda and the land was a series of poems and images entitled, “River Crossings,” which was published in the first issue of the Wild Apples journal. I had just visited Linda’s studio to view the sculpture that would form the basis for our collaboration, but had no idea how the poetry would arise. As I pulled down the drive past the pond, I rolled down my car window and stopped to listen to the water pouring over the dam. The sounds and images of that moment became the first words of the poem:
Small boat twists on its tether, yellow
cord bound to precarious dock,
sound of water rising and falling.
Above the dam, the craft is still
white against dark and radiating
rings, signals intercepted
by insects and rain. Stone embraces
the pond, holds it back, while dry
reeds mingle with new green.
In the hull oars cross, tip back
toward penitent shore, the phoebe’s
careless tail. Blue overtakes
blue, all around the meadow
voices rise
in garlands of flight.
I was struck by how, in that momentary immersion in my surroundings, the lines rushed in without barriers.
In the prior year, illness had made it difficult for me to write, to be inspired, even to focus on the page long enough to coax words from their recesses. Since that day by the pond, however, I discovered a source once again in the outdoors. Now, I often seek a place on the farm to sit in contemplation—a rock by the pond, the meditation hut, a stump surrounded by beaver cuts at the edge of the wetlands.
Plein air, or outdoor, painting became popular in the early nineteenth century in Europe and North America with the introduction of the portable paint box. But the tools of the writer have always been portable, and certainly poets have been scribbling their first notes out of doors for centuries. I have been moved to language by nature for years, but now I want to plant my art into the landscape with even deeper roots. I am fascinated by the idea of plein air poetry. It mandates close observation and encourages appreciation of the landscape and its particulars—the plants, animals, water, rocks, and weather—in both writer and reader.
This summer we began our first plein air experiment at Old Frog Pond Farm, inviting some people who already self identify as plein air writers and others with a passion for this particular landscape. On Sunday, September 22 at 2 p.m. we will enjoy the fruits of their poetry harvest in a poetry walk at the farm. We hope that you will join us. Bring a notebook and pencil if you like, in case, you too are inspired along the way.
If you are moved to write plein air or to take as your subject the out of doors, feel free to submit your work for posting here on the farm’s website. I will look for a new poem each month, and occasionallycomment on some aspect of writing inspired by Old Frog Pond Farm.
Enjoy these late summer days of harvest, migration, and balm.
Susan