Poetry Friday is with Buffy today.
I don’t think of myself as any kind of poetry expert, but I do love poetry in many ways. When my Voxer friend, Dani Burtsfield, asked for help with writing a poem for her mother, I was honored and humbled. Yesterday she went for a walk in the mountains of Montana where she lives and sent me a message about the lilacs and how their blooming means summer. “I think I feel a poem coming on.”
Thus began our late night discussion of her poem. This is what poetry should be, a walk in the woods that leads to talk that then becomes a poem. Jane Hirshfield writes in her poem, Mathematics, “Does a poem enlarge the world/ or only our idea of the world?” I believe that poetry and your own expression of it does enlarge the world. We experience the experience in a new and loving way. Please go to Dani’s blog and read her poem, her first brave contribution to Poetry Friday.
Our discussion of summer made me think about how summer reveals itself differently in different parts of the world. For Dani, it’s in the lilacs. Here in South Louisiana, the landscape is different. My poem attempts to capture my own summer landscape.
Summer
Summer waits
like the rope swing
hanging
from the old oak.Summer welcomes
like sunflowers
opening
a morningSummer vibrates
like cicadas
buzzing
at twilight.Summer lingers
like the sun
hovering
the horizon.–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved
Reflections on the Teche 