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Invitation to Poetry: The Threshold of Summer

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 ThresholdOr 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 . . .

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Mary Camille Thomas

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Mary Camille Thomas’s reflection “Beholding God’s Sanctuary.” My Grandma Sammie knew many psalms by heart and could quote them chapter and verse.

Read More »

49 Responses

  1. 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.

  2. 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!

  3. 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

  4. 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.

  5. 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?

  6. 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!

  7. 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.

  8. 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

  9. 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.

  10. 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.