We strung our harvest
in lines across the corncrib's
chamber: globe amaranth, statice,
celosia (regrettably like brains),
fantastic pods of love-in-a-mist,
(if lucky) sprigs of sea lavender.
Time turned petals to paper
or scales stained with color:
rose, deep purple, a kind of blue,
pink, lemon, yarrow-gold.
We packed them in boxes--
the husks of summer
to tint a winter's day.
in lines across the corncrib's
chamber: globe amaranth, statice,
celosia (regrettably like brains),
fantastic pods of love-in-a-mist,
(if lucky) sprigs of sea lavender.
Time turned petals to paper
or scales stained with color:
rose, deep purple, a kind of blue,
pink, lemon, yarrow-gold.
We packed them in boxes--
the husks of summer
to tint a winter's day.
This poem is perfect. It is, in fact, a poem of such quality that perhaps it should have been saved for submission to one of the more illustrious magazines! But the magazines' loss is the gain of all of us who follow you at Our Place. I think that if they could read this poem from their celestial outposts, the ghosts of Jane Kenyon and Amy Clampitt would be applauding.
ReplyDeleteWow, thank you! What a lovely thing to say! I don't feel I can take too much credit for this one, though. It's mostly flower names--which are so lovely they make a song by themselves.
DeleteI looked up "celosia" on Wikipedia, and yes, the yellow variety does look rather like brains!
DeleteI was thinking particularly of the folded, lumpy kind, not the plumy ones. It strikes me, now, that they also look like coral (a more pleasing image), but at the time they just looked like brains to me.
Delete