Suddenly the news is everywhere. A perfect wrens' nest in an open mailbox. Redbuds having their week of notoriety against the naked woods. Quince flaming out in barren yards. Glossy-sided cows against a fresh green pasture. Our uncut lawn starred over with blossoming weeds. Beside the front porch the surprise bulbs opening in tiny white…
Five Minute Friday: hide
The sky is patched with clouds today, and my lunchtime walk was fragrant with honeysuckle, clover, roses. I've met with 23 students today, one by one, and I sit and wonder who they've seen in their meetings with me, how little of them I know. They're startled when occasionally I step outside of my teacher-ness,…
further up
In the yard, the daffodils are blooming, and in the basket on top of the refrigerator, an onion reached up its own slender greenery. I marvel at this universal urge to grow: how bulbs and seeds and roots gather and force themselves upward, compelled to fruitfulness by a command dating from the fifth day of history,…
a longer Lover
Mornings when the alarm wakes you from a dream of grief so poignant that you shrink from the waking world, bent over your pillow for a moment: Father, I can't. Father, help me. Honeysuckle grows thick in the fence-rows and the trees -- I've only begun to notice it, and already it yellows. You smell…
Look.
When April's sweet showers have pierced to the root March's drought, bathing each vein in a liquor whose potency makes flowers spring forth and little birds sing -- ah, Chaucer, my frenemy! -- then, when I'm not longing to go on pilgrimage, as Chaucer says spring makes people long, or longing to be in love,…
obedience where it hurts
I've begun to read the book of Ezekiel. The last time I read it was nearly four years ago. It was summer then, but now it is spring -- the Mississippi spring which alternates glory with terror, alternates days of delicate blossom and growth with massive storms which leave tracks of desolation sprawling across the…
concerning tests, fruit, resurrection
Spring inhabits the out-of-doors, pollen-yellow and noisy with bird-song, growing thicker and greener by the hour it seems, trees partaking of the fruit that brings knowledge of good and evil and putting forth frail coverings: "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid…
such we are
It's the first day of spring. A little girl in my kids' choir brought me a tiny bouquet of flowers: wild violets, and onion-grass blooms, and dandelions. They were beautiful. Later, the tiniest boy in the choir raised his hand: "I have a question for you, Miss Stacy." I knelt in front of his chair.…
of devils and springtime
White-paper heron wings against a blue sky. Blue sky nestling in puddles between the stubbled rows of last-year's corn. The rows of last year's corn green with new weeds against the borders of the bare trees. The bare trees broken, here and there, by the sudden lavender-pink of a red-bud in bloom. "His Abysmal Sublimity Under…
odds and endings
A peaceful, rainy day, with grade-tallying tasks which satisfy in showing results without my having to expend much in the way of critical or creative thinking. I've been collecting bits of things the past week or so and failing to make anything coherent of them. Here they are, though, coherent or not: A vision of a…
Between Blue Rocks 