We had the sun in a skillet
those well-fed summers.
Green beans, tomatoes,
and okra head high.
Wide mouth Ball jars
brim full of berries.
Cucumber vines.
I'd run through the millet
(cut and baled by late summer),
and my muscles moved long
and loose on my bones.
I'd run without worry
of what might be behind me;
I was fearless and strong.
Years trying to fill it -
the hole left by those summers
of sweat and squash bugs
and long rows to hoe
when I saw the world
through firefly eyes
as a garden to make my own.
For The Tuesday Platform at Real Toads
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
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About Me
- Maude Lynn
- Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. ---Flannery O'Connor
17 comments:
This is a seamless invocation of time and place: set it to music or paint it on a canvas, it is art.
This reminds me a bit of "Dog Days", though it is entirely its own. What a sensory feast this is, how you've made those former summers come back, as well as the solitude of the (so well named) bridge. Finally, the gap, the hunger with nothing to assuage it, that so many of us know so well, though it differs in the details. Wonderful stuff.
Ah, yes, I do agree with Kerry! A great one as always, MZ, and art it is! Hope your week is off to a great start!
Terrific MZ--I love the rhyme and slant rhyme especially and the first stanza, which does describe a summer harvest so beautifully--thanks. k. (Manicddaily)
Yes! The road not taken is like the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. This is especially true for those of us with richly engaged childhoods of work and running and eating and play--OH! I wonder if children of children of farmers inherit any of this? Such a changed world. I've forgotten to be a question of the family/past in the face of a different richness. Love this poem!
This is magnificent
The structure
The cadence
The imagery
The sense of longing
namaste
jzb
Oh, this just makes me sigh. Okra is so beautiful when it flowers. And I love your rhymes in this.
Oh that closing.. to have outgrown those days... somehow the pain of growing up twirled with the sweetness of summer... wonderful
A lovely romp through a chilhood summer. Beautiful imagery... a nice progression from firefly eyes to a question mark outgrown.
killer close, MZ ~
I wasn't sure what to expect here, Mom Zee. I liked the resignation; forgetting what we came for, what was bothering, what had been soul consuming.
Does time heal?
..
Adore the beginning and the whole poem just builds from that strong base. Loved it.
Wonderful sense of circling back to the homegrown origin story. How did Wendell Berry put it -- the long hunter has to go all the way out before s/he can complete the circuit by coming home. "... a question / that I've outgrown." Yes o yes.
Summer both in a skillet, (and of course, knowing where you are, AS a skillet) opens this with both heat and nourishment, but everything has its price, sweat equity, pressure cooking--the question may be outgrown, but the answer...perhaps a different story.
Brautiful imagery! So serene, taking us back to childhood days.
I've come back to this post several times since you posted it. I love the wistful pensiveness it makes me feel, and the robustness of the memories it recalls.
One of my favorites, and you do so many that I love.
The beginning so full of promise "We had the sun in a skillet
those well-fed summers."… the end so wistful and unsure… I suppose this is how it is for many of us looking back, but here we stand doing our best in THIS moment, like we did back then.
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