Let's celebrate Summer Solstice!

Melon

In morning dew,

mud-fresh.

Basho

***

A Final Affection

 

I love the accomplishments of trees,
How they try to restrain great storms
And pacify the very worms that eat them.
Even their deaths seem to be considered.
I fear for trees, loving them so much.
I am nervous about each scar on bark,
Each leaf that browns. I want to
Lie in their crotches and sigh,
Whisper of sun and rains to come.

Sometimes on summer evenings I step
Out of my house to look at trees
Propping darkness up to the silence.

When I die I want to slant up
Through those trunks so slowly
I will see each rib of bark, each whorl;
Up through the canopy, the subtle veins
And lobes touching me with final affection;
Then to hover above and look down
One last time on the rich upliftings,
The circle that loves the sun and moon,
To see at last what held the darkness up. 

Paul Zimmer

Mark Doty & Remembering Maya Angelou ~

Principalities of June

Original light broke apart,

the Gnostics say,

when time began,

singular radiance

fractioned into form

– an easy theory

to believe,

in early summer,

when that first performance

seems repeated daily.

Though wouldn’t it mean

each fracturing took us

that much further

from heaven?

Not in this town,

Not in June:  harbor

and cloudbank, white houses’

endlessly broken planes,

a long argument

of lilac shadows and whites

as blue as noon:

phrasebooks of day,

articulated most of all

in these roses,

which mount and swell

in dynasties of bloom,

their easy idiom

a soundless compaction

of lip on lip.  Their work,

these thick flowerheads?

Built to contain

sunlight, they interrupt

that movement just enough

to transfix in air, at eye level,

now:  held still, and shattering,

which is the way with light:

the more you break it

the nearer it comes to whole.

Mark Doty

***

When Great Trees Fall
 
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly.  Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed.  They existed.
We can be.  Be and be
better.  For they existed.

Maya Angelou
(1928-2014)