April 2024 -  I follow the tangle and the tendril

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Such a luscious month in New England that it seems akin to blasphemy to mark its start with a day to celebrate pranks and fools. Let’s, instead, look to April’s twenty-nine other days, each one ripe with nature’s promise and National Poetry Month’s poems. Let’s emulate poet Louise Berliner and “follow the tangle and the tendril” into the serious delight and enlightenment the rest of April has on offer.

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March 2024 - On the Ground, Alone

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The first day of March marks the start of meteorological spring. Yesterday, on a stroll around the Acton Arboretum, I came upon a clutch of snowdrops, the first I’ve seen this season.  Their white petals, delicately edged in the green of summer grass, nodded to a ground still winter bleak and bare. All about us the world is awakening, from low to the ground to high above in the blue-lit sky.

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August 2023

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Last August, bone-dry in drought, New Englanders prayed all manner of prayers for rain. Now, this summer, it is as if all petitions, a year-delayed, have been granted at once. Still, we can’t help but be grateful; the primal memory of water as life-force, thankfully, continues to flow sweetly, deeply within us all.

Memoir of a Pond Watcher

by Helen Marie Casey

Feathers among the flowers,

water cascading over the spillway,

lily pads, tangerine goldfish, reflections,

Almost hidden, milfoil - intricate

work of art - and then the daylilies,

nonchalant as Venus Ascending.

As if it could matter that no one

is watching, I kiss you right there,

the fern-riddled path conspiratorial.

Mushroom, arrow, leaf, tree roots,

a path diverging. Coral bells and astilbe

nudge me to wonder: What gods do I know?

Dried pine needles underfoot, stillness

rock-like, even the little cocoa-colored caps

the acorns wear remain petulant and stubborn.

A sculpted heron reigns, the pond’s silent

deity, and then a shadowed bench almost

beckons, You come, too. Peace abides.

Lacework meadow, cottonball clouds,

marguerites in full abandon and I,

like them, begin to dance, exultant.

Helen Marie Casey's chapbooks include Fragrance Upon His Lips, Inconsiderate Madness, Zero Degrees, You Kept Your Secrets, and Mums, the Tongue, and Paradise. She has also written My Dear Girl: The Art of Florence Hosmer and Portland's Compromise: The Colored School 1867-1872, which is now part of the Smithsonian Collections. She has won the 2005 Black River Chapbook competition, the 14th National Poet Hunt of The MacGuffin, and the Frank O'Hara Prize. Her work appears in several poetry journals, including The Laurel Review, CT Review, The Worcester Review, Paterson Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, Westchester Review, Greensboro Review, and The MacGuffin.

July 2023

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July is a busy month in nature which means it is a busy month on the farm – the two intertwined and inextricably linked. In garden and orchard, the farmers till, weed, plant, and cull; while all around them, in woods and wetland, grass and sky, the non-human habitants carry on with urgent summer labors of their own.

—Terry House, Poetry Editor

 

Turning Light

by Mary Pinard 

What kind of underworld

weaving could they be working on

 

so busily? These ten gangly-necked

goslings, mottled shuttles plying

 

a zigzag wake in the reedy pond

as their sleek heads turn and angle,

 

then dip - here, there – appearing

to disappear through slits in the watery

 

surface, yet just as quickly they are

back up from some distant loom,

 

their bills draped with the thinnest

green strands that glisten, splash –

 

like tiny diamond stitches made

and unmade in this turning light.

 

Mary Pinard, a long-time plein air poetry contributor, is the author of two books of poetry: Portal (Salmon Press, 2014) and Ghost Heart (Ex Ophidia Press, 2022).  She lives in Roslindale and teaches at Babson College.