Skip to main content

Winter Weeds


Winter Weeds 

“We should take some home.”, he said. 
The crop of winter weeds grew upright
In the white, fresh-fallen snow.
Yellow like straw, like sand, like sunlight.

It was the sweet surprise of them,
Suddenly – there beside the ski trail:
Dried sprays, seed rattles, bowing
Before the chilling winter wind.

We should take some home?
To blossom in a bottle
 On the cluttered kitchen table
In the comfortable confusion
Of opened and unopened envelopes
Of morning tea cups, sugar bowl,
One dirty mitten, pencils, spoons
And the last of the poinsettia.

No.

Better to leave them bending here
To leave evocation to the mind's eye
To know
There is no time but this present.






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

That first summer, June 1968

I was unprepared for the beauty of a June day on the La Have islands: old homesteads surrounded with perennials: daffodils waving bravely in a fierce wind; narcissus decorating  stone outcroppings and perfuming the air; blooming lilacs drawing in as much of the surrounding land as they could manage in a year and so slowly eating up the paths and fields around them; wood trails carpeted with  four petaled bunch berry, the white petals morphing into red berries by winter.   I was unprepared for just about everything that first summer in Nova Scotia. The previous summer we had traveled by VW bus like a mess of itinerant gypsies to stay   in my sister’s house on Bell Island. I had two small children, my English mother-in-law and an increasingly difficult case of morning sickness; Simon had a broken wrist and his arm in a cast but managed, nonetheless, to put the small sailboat   we were trailing behind the bus into the water and sail off (literally) single-hande...

Ruffed Grouse

 A few years ago, in early May, when the sun was surprisingly warm, and the trees newly leaved in a golden green, I took a walk into the woods on an old walking trail. I had been walking for about thirty minutes when a bird flew out of the brush front of me. I froze in my tracks. To my surprise, instead of assuming the “if I don’t move you won’t see me pose”, or flying off, the bird began advancing toward me very slowly.  It was a ruffed grouse,  the size of a very small chicken, with stripped reddish brown and white neck feathers, a wide fan shaped tail with a bright black border ,and a little crown or tuft on the head.  The brown and white stripes in her feathers gleamed in the sunlight and occasionally she spread her tail out like a black-bordered fan. I stayed as still as I could – how often do I encounter a creature in the wild? – as she advanced very slowly, until she was about six feet from me. Then, still strutting very slowly, bobbing her head and and displa...

Communists, Aliens and Pacifists, Go Home!

The Chair of the Putney School Board, and a member also of the John Birch Society, pounded his fist on the table and roared, “We can’t have Heidi Watts in our school because Heidi Watts is a Quaker and Quakers are passive people.” It was 1966 and protest against the Vietnam War was heating up.  Corresponding rhetoric about the threat of communism was also on the rise, and the two forces were being played out over my contract renewal or non-renewal at the small elementary school in Putney, Vermont.  The audience was town’s people, some of them my outraged supporters who, nonetheless, could not suppress a smile at the confusion between pacifist and passivity. But they were not all supporters, either that evening in the library or in a later meeting in the school auditorium ,or in the letters to the editor and the General Store conversations. Earlier in the month a large sign appeared over main street saying, “Communists, aliens and pacifists, go home!". My husband was British...