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.






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

  Welcome!! On this site you will find work in progress and published work from the last fifty-five years. It is, in essence, an archive of published and unpublished work. I have tried to indicate the date each piece was first written and the date it was revised and published, either here or by some other means. This selection includes, or will include essays on education and nature, poems,  memoirs, travel logs, stories and random thoughts. There are  four  categories, including Memoirs, Nature, Nova Scotia and Travel.  My literary career began in approximately 1946, when I became the editor of our school newspaper, The Mock Turtle. It was a proper newsletter, printed on rather dingy white paper by that modern wonder, a mimeograph machine with a hand crank, which tended to go rogue and spit either ink or paper around the room. But it was a proper Newsletter with a picture of the Mock Turtle  on the masthead borrowed from Edward Tenniel, and a byline from  one of the psalms, “…the voic
Post a Comment
Read more

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-handed to explore the islands
3 comments
Read more

The Truth About Warblers

Warblers are irritating, and that’s the truth. It’s a beautiful spring morning, the mist just disappearing and the sun promising a full Monty. I take my binoculars and stroll quietly down to the mailboxes and, just like yesterday, there is a yellow warbler singing full bore, "whichety, whichety, whichety." Where? Must be right there in that bush. But I can’t see it. No. Have I ever seen that bird there? No. She/he flits from branch to branch veiled by the baby yellow-green leaves of spring, barely hatched. The sound has moved. I try to scan with the binoculars. The sound is close, here by my ear, no, over there to the right, "whitchety, whitchety, whichetey…" out of the corner of my right eye I see a tease of yellow.   Ok, be like that. I’ll try another spot. I walk slowly up the trail, listening for sound, looking for another swipe of yellow, or any color on the wing, and at the crest of the hill, right there on the lowest branch of the big maple, right where t
Post a Comment
Read more