July 2024 - Estuary

Twilight in July is a mystical and liminal time. Within its shadows mingle the vestiges of the day’s bright, hot glory and the night’s hushed, fragrant promise of soothing respite. July evenings bridge and blend two distinct environments and, in so doing, create a new one all its own.

Estuary

By Mary Pinard

The estuary is slide and suspension, a prism

of rhythms. It has a tidal chorus, high crested

in a freshet, hushed at the ebb, like in a Greek play.

Impossible to limn, almost, says an artist I know —

it’s made of remnant floods and inflow, flux, plus

mudflat habitat and beds of silt, whose sheets go

twisted, shorn, remade. Epibenthic green algae

like it there, or depending, starry flounders, anchovies,

even the longfin smelt. A form of expansion, like

an epic for a poet — the Hudson’s is 300 quixotic miles —

or a fleet, deep eddy Dickinson might have turned.

Sweetgrass, sedge weave a marsh around it, as kestrel,

curlew, vagrant shrew carry its evanescent route to light:

no two ever alike, ephemeral as phosphorescence at night.

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. 

June 2024 - Fire Fireflies

June’s gifts are rich and dazzling. Indeed, after the sun finally has set on these, the longest, loveliest days of the year, June lavishes us further with magic.

First Fireflies

by Merryn Rutledge

Fireflies, come to celebrate desire,

bring me back to summer nights

when we sat on grown-ups’ laps

lulled by the to and fro of rocking chairs,

lingering heat, and family voices

lowing like the cows beyond the fence.

In the deepening dark we cousins watch

for insect flash, then rouse and run

into the stardust to catch the magic bugs

in cupped palms now lantern-lit.

Against my skin, a fluttering tickle

like when my mother’s feathery

eyelash brushes my kissed cheek.

Opening our hands, we set the tiny beacons free

and spread our arms to wings,

tilting our faces skyward to the bigger lights

that spin around our haloed heads.

Winner of the poetry prize for Orisons’ Best Spiritual Literature 2023, Merryn Rutledge is widely published. “First Fireflies” originally appeared in As Above So Below and is included in the poetry collection, Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed (Kelsay Books). Merryn teaches poetry craft, reviews poetry books by women, and works for social justice causes. She formerly taught literature, film, and creative writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, and then ran a US-based leadership development consulting firm. Born in Arkansas, where generations of forebears were farmers, Merryn lives in New England. http://www.merrynpoetry.org

May 2024 - Eve: The Naming

As the second Sunday of May approaches, mothers – all those literal, legal, and figurative mothers who bore us or reared us or mentored us – fill our minds.  May your thoughts at this time be joyful and multitudinous. And, if they are not, may nature, popularly personified as the ultimate maternal figure,  provide you with inspiration and solace.

Eve:  The Naming

( In memory of Denise Levertov)

by Kathleen Hirsch

A paper sky ,

a blazing fig,

what deep, forgotten memory

in a tree?

I see myself

long ago -- a being

newly sprung

a dawn-struck slip of green.

From deep within

a blind and senseless solitude

I heard my name,

and woke to a desire

still unnamed:

To taste the light

within the flame --

To speak to fire

from a heart of flesh.

To know for whom

or what I longed.

Unleafed in all but my desire,

I had, I saw, arrived.

Kathleen Hirsch, M.A., is the author of three works of nonfiction, Songs from the Alley, A Home in the Heart of the City, and A Sabbath Life: One Woman’s Search for Wholeness.  She co-edited Mothers, a collection of contemporary fiction.  Currently, she directs the Contemplative Writing Program at Bethany House of Prayer in Arlington, MA, where she leads workshops on poetry and spiritual journaling.  “Eve - The Naming” is from the forthcoming collection, Mending Prayer Rugs. Her website is: www.kathleenhirsch.com.

April 2024 - I follow the tangle and the tendril

Ah, April!  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.

 I follow the tangle and the tendril

tracing the leaf’s lineage

long before the bloom and the burst

back to the hard shell of a spit seed

nestling and nesting —

back to when a pip was part star.

What possessed me to climb my own thin thread

to that first touch of sky?

What impulse made green, made curl,

pushed twist and twine?

I didn’t stop at blossom or pink,

barely hesitated when it came to the fruit —

had to chase the pull to produce as if snake-charmed

even though sometimes I thought

I was the one with the flute.

By Louise Berliner

Louise Berliner tells stories through fiber and found objects, novels, poems, and essays. Her writing has appeared in VQR, Porter Gulch Review, Ibbetson Review, The Mom Egg Review, Sacred Fire, and various chapbook collections as well as the online blog, Dead Darlings. Her first book, Texas Guinan, Queen of the Night Clubs, written in part thanks to an NEH grant, is a biography of a Roaring ‘20s night club hostess famous for saying “Hello, Suckers!”. She has a studio at the Umbrella Center for the Arts. https://louiseberliner.weebly.com

March 2024 - On the Ground, Alone

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.

On the Ground, Alone

By Dawn Paul

You catch the high wind above the sheltering trees

sift it through your outspread wing feathers

as though fingering a silk scarf

rock gently side to side, wings held at the perfect tilt

alert for the scent of something cooked by the sun,

or maybe just cruising the sky on this spring day

after the long winter.

When another of your kind comes kiting along

to drift by your side and you lift together on an updraft

I breathe deeply, fill my chest with air.

Dawn Paul is the author of  The Country of Loneliness, a novel, and What We Still Don’t Know, poems on scientist Carl Linnaeus. She has published poetry, fiction and science/nature articles in journals and magazines, including Orion Magazine, Comstock Review and Stonecoast Review. She has been awarded residencies at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference and Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories.  

February 2024 - Cattails

February is full of surprises. Just when you think the snow will never end, you awaken to a balmy thaw. The pond, once frozen solid, is suddenly set free in startled dishevelment. Yes, February is nature’s roller coaster ride: Unpredictable and fast - just like life.

Cattails

by Susan Edwards Richmond

One side: three stalks in an island of bent

and broken reed; on the other: six poles,

wave slightly, two naked, four rife with seed.

One completely plush and inside out,

the others turning. I can see the brown

densely packed grains, the tawny cream pulling

away; the shortest stalk has the largest.

Shook down quivers, but doesn’t break away.

I put my hand atop and squeeze, not down

at all but firm well-sugared cotton candy,

as addictive to finch, sparrow, and wren

as that confection once was to my children,

heads bright with golden floss spilling loose

trailing to each booth at the country fair.

Susan Edwards Richmond is the award-winning author of four books for young children, including Night Owl Night and Bird Count, winner of a Parent’s Choice Silver Award, the International Literacy Association’s Primary Fiction Award, and a Mathical Honor Book. Susan's five collections of nature-based poetry for adults include Before We Were Birds and Purgatory Chasm, both published by Adastra Press. A passionate birder and naturalist, Susan teaches preschool on a farm and wildlife sanctuary in eastern Massachusetts. She is happiest exploring natural habitats with her husband and two daughters, and learns the native birds wherever she travels.

January 2024 - Elegy in Flannel and Cotton

The first, fresh days of any new year are bittersweet. They find us, like that image of the god of doorways, gazing both forward into a waxing, beckoning future and back into a waning past of joys and sorrows which still cling like fragments from a dream. . .

Elegy in Flannel and Cotton

Louise Elisabeth Glück (1943-2023)

by Anastasia Vassos

The poets are dying.

The bone ladder falls to dust---

escapes memory.

Once, when G & I drove up the coast

to Bangor, time forgot

its forward step, & there---

I wanted to make the moon

remain. The eye polishing

the night, astonished.

Now stars bloom myopic.

Nothing to be done.

We grow threadbare.

& I, still dressed

in flannel & cotton, drowsy

from last night’s tumbled sleep

read old words, those rivers

of ice whose work it is

to carry the crates of the dead.

Anastasia Vassos is the author of Nostos (Kelsay Books, 2023) and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate, 2021.) Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Find her work in RHINO, Whale Road Review, Thrush, Comstock Review, Lily Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She speaks three languages, and lives in Boston. “Elegy in Flannel and Cotton" first appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, published by Kelsay Books.

December 2023 - Remembering Elaine

December descends upon us with cold finality. The year is nearly over. The nights are the longest they will ever be. Outside, away from the comfort and joy of festive merriment, it is a contemplative time, a time of letting go. And - because life is a paradox - it is a singularly poignant time for holding on, as well.

Remembering Elaine

By Elizabeth Lund

One great blue heron

punctuates the shore,

huddling in first snow.

What keeps this steel-eyed

juvenile here, weeks after

the others have flown?

Gray on gray she stands

like a wrought-iron

question mark.

What does she read

in the tinfoil sky,

its indecipherable script?

Does she stand, like me,

awaiting a sign, has she

hunkered too far down?

How do winged creatures

lose their lift, their bold

exclamation point?

One could say the sky

turns a deaf ear, that some

stories are meant to trail off.

She stands ramrod straight,

like a stubborn suicide

or a righteous sacrifice.

But I’m not ready to let

her go, as the season’s

first storm spits and swirls.

Elizabeth Lund is the award-winning host of Poetic Lines at NewTV. The show features in-depth interviews with emerging and established poets about their work and creative process. She also interviews poets and reviews major collections of poetry for The Christian Science Monitor, where she served as poetry editor for 10 years. From 2015 to 2020, Elizabeth wrote a monthly column about poetry for The Washington Post. Her own poems have appeared in various publications including The Dalhousie Review, Connecticut Review, The Christian Century, and the Paterson Literary Review. Un-Silenced is her debut collection.

November 2023 - My November Guest

We New Englanders know well the sorrow of November: The darkness of foreshortened days, the decay of frost-blackened blooms, the fresh grief of an empty place at the Thanksgiving table. Robert Frost, too, knew November’s sorrow; but, as he reveals in this month’s featured poem, he also knew its beauty.

My November Guest

by Robert Frost

My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
     Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
     She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
     She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
     Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
     The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
     And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
     The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
     And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost (1874 –1963), the 1892 co-valedictorian of Lawrence High School, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry four times - a feat no other poet has yet accomplished. “My November Guest” is included in Frost’s debut collection, A Boy’s Will, published in 1913. The poem is now in the public domain.

October 2023 - Shelves

October, unlike its predecessor September, dares us to ignore time’s passing.  The buoyant, carefree hues of summer have intensified and turned to flames. The days shorten. The air grows crisp. The calendar year nears its end.  Yet, as October reminds us, eternal youth is not the point – not for nature, not even for us.

Shelves

by Kim Keough

I look up from the umpteenth draft of this poem to watch

You prepare the shelves you are building for our books.

How deftly you saw through the knots and sinew. A swatch

Of worn out sandpaper and drill bits lie next to hooks

You’ll use as anchors on our crooked wall

While above you a school of salmon leaves swim

Away from their tree, against the wind. It’s fall

And you know this light won’t last, but you dare it to dim

As you pry off that lid of stain. I cannot understand

What makes you stay when I’ve never built you a thing

As solid or useful, by my own hand—

Just these rough-hewed words which refuse to ring.

I tap on the window. You startle but point to the shelves,

Our moment read then slid back, to keep for ourselves.

Kim Keough (She/Her), received her BA in English from Mount Holyoke College. Her poetry and photography have appeared in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review. She is the former director of Voices from Inside, a writing program for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women. During the 1990's, Keough made her living as a busker and performed all over the world. She lives and teaches in Western Massachusetts.

"Shelves" first appeared in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review Volume15, Issue 4 

September 2023 - Now Ripening at the Frog Pond: Crops That Feed the Soul

Basho knew it. Wordsworth knew it. Hopkins and Dickinson knew it, too. Mary Oliver definitely knew it: Poetry is nature given language. It is breath and vowels ripening on the tongue. Indeed, September presents a metaphorical harvest of poetic inspiration on the farm.

And, as this month’s poem suggests, artistic inspiration turned to very real, three-dimensional installations of metal, wood, stone, and more abound on the farm this fall, as well.

For more information about “The Stuff of Dreams” Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit 2023 (now through October 8th) featuring the artists from Artisans Asylum Boston, click here Sculpture Walk. For a pumpkin-spiced dose of poetic whimsy, simply read on…

Now Ripening at the Frog Pond: Crops That Feed the Soul

by Georgia Sassen

What is this farm

that grows sculpture, and poems?

Over here is a field of haiku;

be careful where you step,

they’re very small.

And that’s the grove of sestinas.

See how regular they are?

Over here are two orchards of sonnets.

The Petrarchan ripen first;

down there are the Shakespearean.

See how their leaves

rhyme?

We need the trellises to hold up

free verse:

it doesn’t have its own structure, you see,

but taste the sweet variety of its forms!

And down by the pond, the dam is shored up

by a modern form poetry: it’s concrete!

In the woods and by the house are the sculptures,

but I don’t know that much about those.

You could ask the sculptor.

I think she’s in the orchard, firing up the tractor.

And wander down there -

that’s the vineyard of villanelles.

Look how the first leaves and the third leaves

alternate, but at the end they come together.

Come together! Let us gather

in the kitchen of the farm house.

The list of poems

are on the refrigerator.

Georgia Sassen is a poet living in Harvard, Mass., where she is inspired to write and paint by the nature around her. She continues to practice psychotherapy, where she is inspired by the resilience of human nature. “Now Ripening at the Frog Pond: Crops That Feed the Soul” originally appeared in the chapbook, half a peck.

August 2023

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.