Welcome to the Abbey’s Poetry Party #59!
I select an image and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your own poem. Scroll down and add it in the comments section below. Feel free to take your poem in any direction and then post the image and invitation on your blog (if you have one), Facebook, or Twitter, and encourage others to come join the party! (permission is granted to reprint the image if a link is provided back to this post).
As I settle into my new life here in Vienna, I am aware that August for many shops, is a time to close up and go off on vacation. Not being obsessed here with the American quest for continual productivity and availability, I have found the many signs in store windows indicating they are closed for holiday to be refreshing.
Every season has its invitation. Summer asks us to contemplate what the spaciousness of blue skies and the long opening of daylight is calling our hearts to consider? As we grow closer to autumn’s harvest, what are the fruits of summer you still want to savor? What is ripening in you? What sweetness is asking you to give your whole heart to it? Let your response to these questions emerge in a poem and share below with the Abbey community.
On Friday, August 10, I will select one name at random from the submissions and the winner receives a free copy of my upcoming book Desert Mothers and Fathers: Early Christian Wisdom Sayings — Annotated & Explained straight from SkyLight Paths when it is released later this month.
If you are looking ahead to fall for an online opportunity to listen more closely to your own threshold calling, join us for Women on the Threshold. Or if you want to nourish your inner monk and artist, consider Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist. Both experiences are 12 weeks long; both promise lots of transformative possibility . . .
49 Responses
Revelation
Revelation happens
at the moment when
the trees sway to the passing breeze,
the water shimmers clear
with the sun’s million tiny kisses,
and a little bird takes flight
with the strength of the wind
on its wings.
<3
Threshold of Summer
A slight tremble,
for the Time of Warmth is here.
Reverie at the bodies memory of freedom
from the
frigid
NorthEastern
snow squalls and icy whiskers.
The edge approaches me – or – is it I who keeps moving?
So be it!
I know a body made for swimming when I see one!
Summer’s delights are many:
the sweet drone of the cicadas
a canoe winding its way down the river
trees heavy with green, lush leaves
the smell of long-awaited rain
sidewalks alive with children and chalk and bicycles and bubbles
fireflies dancing a midsummer’s pageant
Each of these and more fill the summer’s nights and days
But this year, with simplicity and ease,
it is the plaintive song of the loon
that opens my heart
Calling forth the ancient knowing of all creatures
Beckoning all who listen to pause, and
remember
lovely word pictures….
FLIGHT
I’ve always believed
that like a kite
I must wait
until someone else decides
to take me out
to let me fly
at the end of a string.
But then today
I realized
that
I
wings.
So I’ve decided
to take me out
to let me fly
with
no
strings
attached.
Ha! typo in second part! should read–
But then today
I realized
that
I
have
wings.
This is a wonderful poem!
I agree!
It is nearly mid-August
and
I feel as if summer has not quite begun.
There is heat
and children are out of school
but
my summer state of mind
has not yet arrived.
A crisis,
a wedding,
the deadlines,
the debts…
I can see over the threshold
into days spent walking, cloud-watching, reading;
evenings on the patio
talking, laughing, drinking wine…
When will I be able to take that step?
The gardener knows it’s August.
Sun so bright it hurts…and heals.
Tomato plants, huge, tumbling over,
heavy with fruit.
Hydrangeas, rampant, pannicles bending the
shrub under their weight.
And…purslane!
I want the juice of
that
to run down your chin,
you,
the one who ripens me.
Take
that
in, beauloved me,
plush like peach
or yellow raw
fresh from the husk
on the cob.
Taste the light
in me,
texture of my radiance,
every bite,
its gentle give and
sting
of sweetness
in the tooth.
You first,
you,
the love who tends
this soul
and raises from this earth
myself
more beautiful, beloved,
whole.
Beautiful.
Thank you!
Summer view
Garden green
stretches across
corn yellow
then rapeseed bronze
into the
ocean
molten sapphire green
and on
and up
into the sphere
where the only colour
is
Beyond
my summer home
Never
I never dropped
the chalice.
Tho’ I lost a few years
now and then.
Never dropped a memory
even in the worst night.
Kept them all on my face,
And passed through the gate.
Blue and brown.
The colours of water, sky,
and rich cool earth.
Three elements to feed us,
body, mind, and spirit.
From earth we take stone
and fashion it to frame the sky,
and shelter us from the elements.
Blue and brown.
Elemental colours.