This Post is longer than usual…but that is really the point of an Old Home Day Celebration. I invite you to take your time with it. Please enjoy the bounty of pictures!

The Old Home Day celebration in East St. Johnsbury was held in midsummer. It was generally a two-day event, featuring a Saturday parade up route 2 (effectively the Village’s “main street”), followed by games and activities in the yard of what was for years the East Village School. Sunday featured a church service and a dinner, followed by a meeting of the Old Home Day Association.

I was pastor of the Third Congregational Church there in the 1970’s and 80’s. The Church was effectively host of the celebration, but it was truly a community event with contribution and participation from the whole village and surrounding area. To me it was just the kind of event a community church should help create. It was about history, family, connections, memories, and stories. Presence, not belief, was the common bond. Every generation participated.

The Parade was not elaborate, and like much of our lives, often felt pieced together at the last minute. But there was humor, creativity, and the flash of beauty and elegance. Each year Irene Stanton, Anne Smith and all the other community leaders of their era (and the years before and after), worked and planned for months to make it a success. It was about participation, not perfection.

I started writing this poem several years after I left the ministry and East St. Johnsbury. I have worked on it periodically over the thirty years since. I used to think the Old Home Day event was fun, and maybe just a little a bit sentimental. I knew it required a lot of hard work. But I always knew it was important in ways I could not really understand yet.

As I share this with you, I do it with deep affection, loving memory and lots of sadness. I think about Irene Stanton who thought of herself as a devout Christian but cared passionately and equally about every child in the community. I think about the other people I knew then…most of whom I have not kept in touch with. I wonder about their stories and lives. Old Home Day was never about sentiment. It is about what we cherish and what we have lost.

I realize that in sharing the poem I become a lot like the folks who came back each year…or maybe only once or twice…wanting to be welcomed, remembered, but finding that things keep changing and moving on, and new folks bring their lives to the community.

So I remember with deepened tenderness those who stayed, those who left, those who came back, those who will never come back…the new folks bringing different histories and perspectives as well. I want to be part of a community that feels gratitude for them all—the people of our Village. I want to pause, hoping, as the Old Home Day organizers quietly did, that all their lives have been, are still, and will continue to be, full of courage, richness and discovery—threaded with stories, amazing, painful, joyful, and hilarious in their detail.

Special thanks to Bruce Benoit, who has taken pictures for decades in East St. Johnsbury, and provided all the images in this post (along with many more I simply could not fit in!). He is a person of enormous creativity and talent whose family has lived there all his life, (except for a few years in St. Johnsbury).

Old Home Day Parade

Late in the time of dying elms
down by Rod's Exxon station
where the parade always forms
next to the yard of the recently abandoned school
six horses scuff the highway with iron shoes.

Sixty years ago   right here   the ruts of May
were worn down to July's dust. 
Elwin's hands are full of reins…the horses 
spooked by tractors.  The Dresser boy
on his crepe-papered bike
the town band practicing. 
Eighteen-wheelers grumbling and belching
behind the sheriff's car.
  
This year's theme is: East Village: Yesterday and Today 
same theme as last year and the year before.
Though it never seems they will... 
enough participants and watchers show up 
to make it all worthwhile.
There are   as always   floats 
depicting the history of the town.
Committees have been arguing all week
about the way things were 
and improvising details all morning. 

Up the road   on a scrap of lawn
that hasn't yet slipped down to the Moose River
next to the pole where Pat Bradley
used to raise the flag each morning
Ralph Chase Sr. sits in an aluminum folding chair.
The cold of ninety Vermont winters 
hides in his afghan-covered knees.  
His hands are heavy on his lap.
Helen is in the nursing home this year.

Across the road on the church lawn 
Irene Stanton worries out loud to Anne Smith
that the parade is late again   like always.
She's glad this time she doesn't have to be a judge.  
(Last year, in order to include everyone 
they invented more prize categories 
than there were contestants.)
Next year she'll sell her home to one of the Ely kids
and pack a few belongings into a single room in town.  

The parade begins 
crowded into a quarter mile of Route 2 
with the ghosts of all earlier parades
and all that will follow.

The horses first—the rubber-tired wagon
so no one will get hurt if Elwin loses control.
Tart LaBounty follows   grinning at everyone 
squawking the horn of his black Model A
(which doesn't help with the horses.)
They creep past the bridge where Route 2 
used to cross the river to the mill   past the granite blocks 
of the mill's foundation guarding the opposite bank
past the clay pipe—choked with knotweed—through which 
a few homes still contribute directly to the river.

The Dresser boy   as usual   can't stay in line
racing ahead   past Joyce DeWitt and the ladies' kitchen band
weaving in and out among the Ely children 
(dressed as "The Four Seasons in East Village")  
crepe paper tattering in his wheels.   He is overcome 
with the present.  It is all he can feel 
there is no stopping him.

Ralph's friend Mack Ford died four years ago. 
Today he's there with Ralph. There are corners of ground
all over town he hayed by hand (scythe and wooden rake)
that now grow up to burdock and willow.

All those places belonged to him.  Now 
they don't belong to anyone. 
The barn he stored the summers in 
has finally crumbled back into the hillside.

Wayne Patenaude on the old John Deere B
drives equipment up and down this road all summer. 
He watches the people watching the parade… 
wonders if he will have a stroke the way his father did
and not be able to keep farming.
Maybe in twenty years there'll be a float
about the last farm in East Village.
The church service posed on the hay wagon he’s pulling
doesn't look like any Irene can remember
but it's good to see the young people
who quit church so promptly after Sunday school 
make an effort.
The parade has streamed into Patenaude’s hayfield
and is reassembling for its return.

Those who have come back for the day walk over to Irene.
Her greeting means their visit is official.
She’s the one who does the work of remembering
recognizes them at once like the print of an old dress.
Alaska   Ohio   the next town over.  They each 
bring their private past. 
They all want to be missed.

The parade returns in some disorder
an army attempting a dignified retreat…
dissolves in the schoolyard.

Ralph Jr. and Marge take Ralph Sr.
up to visit Helen at Pine Knoll.  They sit together
half an hour without words.

Beside the school the Dresser boy paws through 
sawdust heaped in an old tractor tire for pennies
long after the others have given up.
His parents help get chairs and tables
set up for the supper.

Anne Smith drives Irene home across the bridge 
to take a nap.

Instead of resting   Irene pokes around the house
she knows she will leave.  She stares out 
at the plum trees crowding against Ben's woodshed
which has gone these thirty years without repair
and at the rotting column of the elm
that used to give them shade.

Why is it   she wonders 
the things at hand keep getting smaller
like children's voices from the schoolyard
and the silence in the house keeps growing?

After the Divorce

Halfway around the winter field 
a side-delivery rake is stopped…
unfinished windrow 
dusted with snow.
Maple and cherry clamber
rubble of stone walls.  
A graveyard   marked by rotting posts
between the woods and sagging barn 
sprouts poplars. 
  
Because I look for these things
a landscape stares back at me
like an old letter 
yellowed   anticipating 
what has become its past.

Yesterday an old friend called
for the first time in months.
I thought   like so many others
he only wanted reassurance 
I can no longer give.
We ended up talking
about the weather.

When I lived on the farm 
there was an orchid 
white   pink-purple blushed 
that grew three springtimes in a row
under ash trees on the old Burroughs Road.  
The fourth spring it disappeared.
I kept searching.

I knew I was learning 
to press the present like a nettle   
tight against my heart.

Why then resentment   
when my choice wounds widely…
this friend calling
who still loves us both.   

What do we do with the stories of our imperfect lives? Especially the stories that generously illustrate our imperfection? If we are fortunate, we work to continue the stories, not hide or bury them, and if we are really fortunate, the other participants let us. Even join us.

This poem is to a dear friend who is—fortunately for me—still a dear friend. The separation from my first wife happened almost forty years ago. I started writing the poem almost twenty years ago. It seemed unfinished…and it was.

Recently I took it out again, and faced that strange resentment I had felt at my friend’s struggle with the change I was making in my (and many people’s) lives. I realized I wanted to acknowledge how remarkable his affection for both of us was and has been. When I did that, the residue of resentment melted away. And when I shared the poem with him and talked to him about it, he could tell me matter-of-factly how hard it had been for him.

I heard what I had been protecting myself from pretty clearly. And I could more completely claim the affection I continue to feel for my former wife.

The process of revision isn’t always dramatic. But it is a gift in writing to experience that shift of perspective. Obviously, we don’t always write poems to facilitate such a change, but a poem may be an occasion for its happening…and it’s a gift when it is.

Oh, and almost everyone I’ve shown this poem to asks me What the heck is a side-delivery rake? The picture below was taken in New York, near the Vermont border. It’s a rake that gathers mown hay when it is dry enough to store, into a windrow that a baler can come along and compress into dense, tidy bales for storage in the haybarn. I have learned that windrow like so many older farming words is not usually recognized in the New York Times Spelling Bee!

Often what we mean when we say we are out in “nature” is that we’re in a place where visible effects of human presence haven’t completely ruined things.

But of course, this isn’t a very precise definition. Humans are part of the natural order, even though we create much that we think of as “outside” or “apart from” nature. We recognize that the changes brought into this world through us have had and are having dramatic impacts on that natural order that has given rise to us. Some, like cities; deforestation; industrial agriculture; are obvious and massive in their impact…others are subtle and indelible—even if invisible to the untrained eye—like eradications of species; explosions of invasives; new poisons in the soil, water, air.

So, when I head for the shallow ponds at Beech Forest in Provincetown Mass. each year, I try to come as a caring and receptive visitor. I want to see, hear, smell, observe, learn. But I am also this complicated creature in my own right, bringing my clumsy physical intrusion. And I carry my jumble of information and misinformation, judgment and prejudice, perceptions of value and “usefulness.” Like it or not I am a representative of my species with its amazing powers and far, far too little wisdom and inclination (apparently) to use them well.

I am increasingly uncomfortable with many of the assumptions and conventions we use to define this relationship. And they all have consequences! The story of Adam and Eve is an early one.

At our best aren’t we searching for respectful, honest, and honorable ways to be part of this astonishing beauty, destruction and diversity weaving through us?

Now that I think about it, this is what much of my poetry is about.

Another Day in Eden

(The ponds at Beech Forest)

Painted turtle hatchlings   
roil together   thin shells
click like crickets practicing.

Bright waxing lily disks   
on dark tea of last year’s perforated 
cattail swords and rotting sedges.
	 
Our footsteps quivering their skin 
frogs’ wet squeak   leap   flash
from one invisible into another.
 	
Both food for heron   whose 
patience admires in her own way.    
And we who feed our bodies 

elsewhere   move on   delighted   
and   because delighted   
confident   today we are benign.

And then… there is a frog acting completely different than it did in the poem. And this spring’s lady slippers five paces up from the pond.

What Good Are Words?

We walk the irresistible
detritus of the shore…
these pummeled empty
shells…stones tossed
in their fused diminished
silences…bones in webs
of seaweed wrack
beyond the waft of feathers…

Why does the mind finger
this gold on the sunset
ocean as if it could be peeled
off like a cloak and wrapt
with infinite gentleness
around our bodies…
and the sometimes ache
to do this for each other.

We’re down on Cape Cod for two weeks. We’ve come here every spring for the last 36 years (except 2019).

I’ve been struck—wandering the beach again—by the wonder and openness that creeps into me on these explorations.

So much pounding and rubble…the litter of demolition…the stunning changes of a year—and yet…a gentleness and watchfulness…a heightening of attention…an alertness to surprise and beauty.

Is it a suspension of fear and guilt that happens in the presence of this vastness? A kind of freedom that shows up when I’m nudged outside myself?

The memory of our daughter, Emily, picking through the shades of colored stone with a muted rainbow creation in mind.

Then suddenly in the midst of a sunset’s beauty…this elusive generosity…this impulse of extraordinary tenderness and affection.

Early Spring

two apple trees
waist deep
in morning fog

black branches
perfectly
unpronounceable

So much saying and turmoil.

A reminder that not-saying is also an option.

Visit to Harpswell

Soft-shell clams have quit the small
tide-flat beside the house   only 
a crushed-shell layer of evidence.
Mussels have abandoned every 
inch—two hundred-sixteen miles— 
of shore the township boasts.

Over crab cakes and roasted 
root vegetables we discuss green crabs
first brought here in ballast water
in the eighteen hundreds   and like us
tough   adaptable   not much good 
to eat   invading up the coast.

The granddaughter is six weeks old
still distressed by this assault
of senses.   Her mother’s milk soothes
only for a moment.   Her father
raises oysters   hopes to clean the ocean
capture carbon   make delicious food.

Sunday’s paper says this year scallops
perished in Long Island Sound before
they could be caught and eaten.   Oyster
shells whiten in the Gulf.  We have 
no way to keep up with the losses
and still   we’re desperate to comfort her.

From the Ground Up—Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities, is an online journal of conversations about conservation, climate, and communities in New England. I am delighted that the Spring 2026 Issue includes Visit to Harpswell, and the accompanying photograph of blue mussels. Link here. There is also a recording of me reading the poem.

From the Ground Up is a hopeful publication partly because it pays close attention to, and celebrates the wonder and complexity of, life in communities throughout New England. It also offers hope because it addresses with intelligence and caring the very real challenges our land, water, air, and these communities—these people—face. It investigates the interweaving of science, economics, culture, climate, tradition, stories, and spirit. It does not rant as if the answers were simple and obvious. It does not swerve into sentiment to avoid difficult truths.

For me the worst part of our current social, moral, environmental and political crisis is that it feels like an orgy of cruel distraction. We are overwhelmed with “solutions” to fictional problems, oversimplification and complete distortion of real challenges, blame, projection and fury instead of honest conversation and investigation, outright denial of the crises of climate change and accelerating extinction, military might presented as the “easy” solution.

The skills we need to exercise: understanding, learning, thoughtful conversation, invention, imagination, self-awareness, constructive work, decency and responsibility, patience, the ability to step back, reconsider and correct—all of them atrophy and in fact we and our communities diminish. It’s like a relentless plague of emotional locusts that leave us without charity or hope at the end of the day.

So journals like From the Ground Up are precious resources as we try to live constructively in our communities, learn how to be partners with the natural order that creates and sustains us, and effectively compost the hate and fear that are generated to manipulate us. I urge you to read the Spring 2026 issue.

Winter Language

Unlike the cling and drag of ice 
this cold snow explodes as birds alight
beside its weightless waiting.  Poof … and 
puff … and drift … sketch the tiny impact
of their feet and feathers   a winter wood
alive with brief exquisite showers   
until the wind regains its voice  
sweeps away the dialect of hours. 

Impermanence has been the theme of 2026, and of this March in particular.

Not resignation to the terrible things happening in our world, but reminders that what we often take for granted can be so easily destroyed—and what makes us most hopeful and joyful is in fact extraordinarily delicate and imperiled. The homes and lives of ordinary people, the lemon groves, gardens, power and water systems, fields of grain, schools, health care facilities, factories, and yes, even oil and gas infrastructure. And of course, our confidence in the gifts of honesty, respect, and intelligent leadership so easily destroyed. Our hope for an open, pluralistic, democratic political structure and the culture of courage, self-examination, respect and creativity that is required to keep it flourishing are in terrible danger.

I continue to be astonished that a man so clearly deranged, so far beyond anything like compassion, sympathy, and grace can be wielding the machinery of economic, diplomatic, and military power impulsively and brutally, with a team of compliant lackeys. And many who call themselves Christian continue to support him.

So, when I look at the woods after another late winter snowstorm, I admire its beauty and it reminds me of the dangers ongoing. But it’s not just projection of my alarm onto the countryside around me. It is the woods calmly reminding me that such fragility abounds and is rich and incredibly varied, and—strangely—powerful.

To see the language of snow and branches and birds and wind in its beauty, uniqueness and impermanence…somehow it renews and calms.

So I will be both outraged and determined in the company of millions in the No Kings Rally events throughout the nation this Saturday, March 28. I will be there knowing things have changed but also that with our hope and determination they can change again. I hope you will take part in any and every way you can.

Upcoming Event

“Natural Selections” at North Branch Nature Center
Friday, April 3--7:00-9:00 pm

To register, click here:

I am excited that again this year we are celebrating and sharing the gifts of Poetry, Natural Wonder, and Music in a fundraising event for this remarkable community institution.

Last Visit

Susan rode up with her father in the ambulette.
Death had visited once on Long Island   tried
but failed.   I’ll die here he said but not just yet.

We’d added a room with picture window right beside
our woods a decade before.   He told the nurse it had been 
built for him—time and place he knew   his to decide.

A few worn clothes   daughter pictures   faded quilt  
photo of him as Boys National Table Tennis Champion
at thirteen beside a trophy flashing silver gilt.

His frailty   like a boxer’s robe he’d put on—
graceful cover for the bruise of his long fight—
while he relived losses and battles won.

His brother Seymour gone in that terrifying cargo flight
over the hump in Himalayan snow—almost a child,
sweet-cheeked   ice-claimed—Cy held his loss tight.

He had been a city boy   but said it felt right
to be up here where it was wild—or less wild,
if you learn to accept the dark stilled night.

November he announced   All these hills are filled
with empty trees   the joy of saying it in his mouth.  
Feeders—darting chickadees   brash jays—seed spilled

to squirrels   mourning doves   turkeys poking through
wizened grass   frozen footprints on the ground—
he’d seized on chances like that in his youth.

Fisher cat and owl   unseen in forest brown
then present suddenly—a shiver in the soul—
staring back at us   no blink or sound.

Death—intimate as those haircuts—part of a whole.
At meals he’d reach into his mouth   pull out a small coal 
of tooth   smile   place it gently with the others in a bowl.

Lighting a yahrzeit candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s death is a simple, powerful Jewish tradition to honor their memory. Susan and I will light a candle for her father Samuel (Cy) Sussman on the evening of March 15. It will burn for over 24 hours there on the kitchen counter—a small steady light through the night—a companion for our day. An act of remembering and thanksgiving. Another of the gifts Susan and her tradition have brought into my life.

Today’s poem is about Cy’s life and the year and a half he lived with us. He joined us in Vermont after a lifetime spent mostly in New York City. Susan’s sister, Linda and her wife Emily-Sue had led the effort of caring for Cy after his wife, Wilma, had died from a long illness in their Florida retirement community. It was clear to Cy and all of us that this was his last visit.

But what a gift to have that time with both Wilma and Cy before she died, and then, after her death, with Cy. Time to sing and celebrate with them…to introduce them to their grandchildren-by-marriage, hear their stories, share food, friends, games, shelling peas, political discussions. The candle reminds us it’s a gift to enjoy and even to grieve as part of a full life.

But in this time of increasing and relentless war, loss and grief threaten to overwhelm…the grieving die before they can mourn their children’s loss…the next day, more bombs, more death…the terrifying rubble of cement and steel…the shreds of garments, parts of photographs, soiled plastic cups, shattered furniture, and yes, bodies scattered throughout the dust and fragments. The survivors dazed, starving, and heartbroken. We are overcome just watching and listening. Who will share their mourning…help remember?

We acknowledge that it is a privilege to celebrate a long life, all its loves and losses, fame and failure. But of course, even that celebration always includes terrible losses—the horror of the Holocaust, Cy’s brother, Seymour—one year older than our eldest grandchildren—lost in the snows of the Himalayas during WWII, our beloved daughter lost so young. Now our hearts are asked to open wider…to grieve with our companions overwhelmed by loss.

Sometimes when we allow ourselves to mourn, there are moments when we feel…not the guilt…not the depression…but the loss and longing as a recognition of who we are, who we can be…a connection. A small candle flame…unexpected strength helping us survive.

Upcoming Event

“Natural Selections” at North Branch Nature Center
Friday, April 3--7:00-9:00 pm
To register, click here:

I am excited that again this year we are celebrating and sharing the gifts of Poetry, Natural Wonder, and Music in a fundraising event for this remarkable community institution.

Gratitude

The peonies and gladiolas are more 
seductive every fall.   I choose slips

of peony root with three buds full 
of color that may prosper years from now.

I dig shaggy gladiola corms
plumped on slender stalks   next year’s

replacements for the tough exhausted husks
left from the thrust of color-trumpets to the sky

purple   steeped in black   regal crimson 
slim white Abyssinian   lavender 

that cried out to sunset orange.
Bulblets cling   intent on futures of their own.


Beauty’s nonchalant kindness 
accepts the slow learning of my eyes.

A few days of October sun—they are
like gratitude   always a surprise.
  
I plant the slips   come in and sort the corms 
possessed by past and future blooms.

I remember how I dreaded grownups 
who creaked like closing doors.

Even now I fear joy might never 
be allowed back through my window.

But gratitude’s a different eye that opens—
unnerving in its great permissions.

In sun   on this cold porch   I’m grateful.
Some shy part of me is always

sitting here   no wisdom   no plan   full 
of psalms   no notion who I’m singing to.

Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Gratitude is a word used to describe very different emotional states. Don’t we need the practice of gratitude Robin Wall Kimmerer explores in her work?

Gratitude starts with profound respect and affection. It’s an essential expression of our humanity. Sometimes it can seem effortless—but it does not come cheap. Where does it come from? A sudden experience of the mystery and beauty of the world we live in? Well, sometimes…hopefully…for all of us—even if only briefly. The dogged struggle for survival when hunger, torture, oppression, and systematic injustice are our daily bread? Remarkably, sometimes…yes. Training offered by the practice, example, and loving instruction of family, community, and spiritual tradition? Truly something we do at our best.

Isn’t it amazing how words for things we cherish get weaponized? How has Respect come to mean “shut up and stay in your place,” Gratitude become “bend the knee and acknowledge our dominance”. (Isn’t it remarkable how un-grateful the world appears in Donald Trump’s version of the word.) Let’s not let our language be converted to meanings that are just forms of control.

So, let’s celebrate and practice real gratitude—which is part mindset and part mystery. It suffuses our bodies, opens our minds, and makes us tender. It is the active experience of love for our wondrous fragile earth. And it allows us to recognize life and the earth loving us in return, creating a partnership that is both within and beyond us. As Robin says, this is the fertile ground of the sacred.

So, let’s respect and care for each other as we do our peonies and gladioli, and children. This is where our democracy wants and waits to flourish.

Three notes:

Peonies can be lifelong companions. They are hardy perennials, and in spring, they bloom with riotous abundance…blooms that erupt in glory and before long, collapse. Remember to leave the fallen petals decorating the counter or table for a few more days.

Gladioli are astonishingly diverse. Blooms keep opening in sequence up the stalk. In Vermont we dig them in the fall and store the corms (after removing the husks from the corms). Farther south you can leave them to overwinter in the ground…but dig them up and replant and add compost periodically or they will become their own competition.

Children…I keep being amazed and grateful at how they pay such attention to the intimate and immediate…and also love to play and pretend—but have no fondness for pretense.

I want to focus on The Adamant Co-op. A living example of what rural life can be.

We are acting as though Earth is here principally for us to exploit and convert to uses that suit strange (often destructive) definitions of our need. This leads to profound social and economic injustices. One of them is the historic, increasing divide between urban and rural life. If the vast expanse of our nation is treated first and foremost as the larder to fuel a detached urbanized culture, it’s no surprise that much of rural America is being either laid waste or forsaken. It shouldn’t shock us that poverty and isolation run rampant as many of our rural communities hollow out.

A strange flip-side of this division develops. Absent a healthy integrated rural/urban life, many people of good will increasingly adopt a detached sentimentalized relationship to nature—an expectation that rural life should be pure and simple emerges. Our very presence in nature becomes suspect…as though most human engagement with the land, woods, and waters is inherently destructive.

Significant restoration of wildness is essential to a sustainable future for both humanity and our planet. I think there are new (or maybe forgotten old) ways we need to relate to the natural order creating and sustaining us. But it is appalling and defeatist to conclude there’s no place for humans in the astonishingly rich explosion of invention and creativity that is our Earth.

Let’s not embrace a detached elitism that leaves rural Americans feeling patronized and judged as they struggle to survive. We need to recover/re-invent and support through new policies, a vision of our place in the natural order based on respect, intelligence, justice and healing. We can’t let economic exploitation harden into a corrosive cultural divide.

Back to the Co-op.

The Adamant Co-op is a cooperative food store (with other stuff too) in a tiny village that is part of the small town of Calais, Vermont. It’s the home of the local Post Office. It’s a market for and supporter of local farms and businesses. It is a place to meet and gossip with your neighbors. It runs a community newsletter. It’s a center for cultural events. It holds a summer Black Fly Festival. Some might say quaint; others might say alive. This poem is about a day visiting there.

Adamant Co-op

At first   I thought it was an oxymoron.
Then   I considered…
given the determination
of these people to cooperate 
perhaps it’s a tautology.

Any place that holds an annual
Black Fly Festival 
needs a store with a 
Vigilant wood stove
a good wine selection,
and a cookbook of its own
butter in every recipe.

I drove there to meet Nel
who had called to tell me
I was winning bidder on a painting
at Kent Corner Museum’s silent auction
two months ago.  She was going
to the Co-op for a meeting
and could bring the painting there.

I came early   chatted
with customers and staff
(could not tell them apart).
Sat by the stove   considered 
hand-made ornaments
agreed with the poster
that Black Lives Matter
watched folks pick up mail
(amazed the USPS hadn’t 
closed this rural outpost yet).  
An old friend and I discussed retirement 
and communal birthday parties.

Nel arrived.  
I gave her an envelope of cash,
took the painting    drove home
after saying good-bye to everyone
feeling slightly guilty
that I didn’t stay 
to take part in the meeting.

A final note:

Cooperative strategies for production and commerce have a long, proud history. They aren’t exactly Capitalist, but they recognize the need to mobilize capital to help get things done. They aren’t State Socialism, because it’s people—not the State—that owns them, and it’s the growers, consumers, communities that need and benefit from them. They pull together people of very different backgrounds and beliefs around basic human needs. Though they are fiscally healthy when well-managed, their primary objective is maximizing community well-being, not monetized profit. People throughout the U.S. and the world have turned to them to protect farmers, rural electric consumers, workers, and even small-business owners (see worker co-operatives: https://www.usworker.coop/what-is-a-worker-cooperative/).

I could go on.

As we feel dazed by the welter of absurdity around us, helpless as a result of our doom-scrolling, and even discouraged despite our protest and resistance, it’s essential that we begin exploring the institutions and practices that will help build healthy communities and an open, just, welcoming society. Co-ops aren’t a bad place to start.

Here are some helpful links:

The Adamant Cooperative website: https://www.adamantcoop.org/
New England has remarkable groups exploring the intersection of active land use, community and environmental well-being and healthy economies:
Vermont Almanac: https://www.vermontalmanac.org/
Northern Woodlands: https://northernwoodlands.org/
From the Ground Up: https://www.fromthegroundupne.org/

Picking Raspberries

We are picking raspberries
in the bramble tangle
that your carefully tended bed has become.

After all those years giving…
this was the place for savoring
this home you called summer...
staying from spring to fall.

You couldn’t come this year or last.
We phoned to ask permission 
your frail voice cheerful with consent.

The thunderstorm prowls   impulsive
strangely indecisive.

We pick with familiar greed— 
sometimes from the litter 
of fallen purpled fruit   we pinch 
pink almost-ripe till they release 
because we won’t be back in time.

We lift arches   expose hidden berry clans
plunder till they stain our hands
then turn like memory 
back down the same row
for the unnoticed and unseen.

Strangers have already been here   
trampled vines.  Two ash saplings
a few burdock have moved in.
Even the bear may come.

The rain releases just as we are done.

All the time we picked
you were there with us   
welcoming   yes
to this place you are leaving
with that other yes.

My father’s youngest brother, Fletcher Van Gorder Parker was a wonderful expression of the Protestant Christian tradition in which he was raised. I think he got most of his kindness, insight, and affectionate good humor from his mother, Katharine. He told me his father, Fletcher (who preached for over thirty years at Immanuel Congregational Church in Hartford, CT) generally conveyed the message that “he should be better” whereas Katharine offered him complete love and acceptance with companionship for his own adventure in living.

Van was married to Lucille (Hemple) Parker for 62 years. They shared and practiced together a deep faith that welcomed the unknown, the stranger, cherished the Earth, worked for justice and equality, raised three remarkable children. Not judgmental or dogmatic, the churches they served were truly supportive communities. In retirement, Van turned to writing poetry that is observant, witty, wry and always caring. Reversal is a poem included in his fifth and final volume, Growing Still, which combined new work with earlier poems (and whose title is a wonderful play on words).

Reversal

It happens sooner or later
If you live long enough –

A sense of not being in charge
Or, as the French might put it,

Of being passé. It’s not necessarily
A bad thing to be a back number.

In some ways it’s a relief.
No need to keep up with

Somebody’s expectations.
A time to learn about plants

And animals and other people,
To do less judging

And more appreciating.
To begin to connect the dots

And figure out how you
Might fit into the picture.

A chance to re-invent yourself 
And discover there’s more to you

Than you thought there was
And most of it is better than

You dared to believe.

What a gift to celebrate two people who shared with us lives of genuine goodness! I know you have people you honor and remember for the hope and joyfulness they bring…whether they have practiced a particular faith or it just seemed a natural part of their being.

Sharing gratitude for human goodness is essential to remembering who we are and hope to be. In a time when so much deliberate effort is expended to turn us against each other, it’s a touchstone that helps keep us sane—even hopeful. Clear and straight-forward, not weighted with obligation, not strenuous or self-righteous—as though this is just the way we’re meant to be. It leaves us wondering why it’s so hard to figure life out much of the time.

I think of Van and Lucille’s lives as the fertile soil in which democracy flourishes, and it’s the way of living that a real democracy supports and nourishes in return. Of course, individuals, families, and communities all over the world experience and share this kind of ordinary goodness, whatever political system they live in. But what a difference if we live in a system that values and honors this goodness rather than trying to suppress or eliminate it!

There is an intimacy and connectedness to this goodness that lets us join the world around us in its diverse, widening and mysterious presence without the obstructions of guilt, resentment, fear, and judgment.

The gift of picking raspberries, feeling Van and Lucille’s welcome, enjoying the fruit, the place, knowing this might be our last time there.

We are also holding in our hearts Renee Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti…ordinary good people, moved to go out and stand up for others being brutalized on the streets of Minneapolis.

How can their presence be treated as a threat—their lives snatched from them—in an instant of viciousness? The goodness of caring people is under systematic attack.

Picking Raspberries

We are picking raspberries
in the bramble tangle
that your carefully tended bed has become.

After all those years giving…
this was the place for savoring
this home you called summer...
staying from spring to fall.

You couldn’t come this year or last.
We phoned to ask permission 
your frail voice cheerful with consent.

The thunderstorm prowls   impulsive
strangely indecisive.

We pick with familiar greed— 
sometimes from the litter 
of fallen purpled fruit   we pinch 
pink almost-ripe till they release 
because we won’t be back in time.

We lift arches   expose hidden berry clans
plunder till they stain our hands
then turn like memory 
back down the same row
for the unnoticed and unseen.

Strangers have already been here   
trampled vines.  Two ash saplings
a few burdock have moved in.
Even the bear may come.

The rain releases just as we are done.

All the time we picked
you were there with us   
welcoming   yes
to this place you are leaving
with that other yes.

My father’s youngest brother, Fletcher Van Gorder Parker was a wonderful expression of the Protestant Christian tradition in which he was raised. I think he got most of his kindness, insight, and affectionate good humor from his mother, Katharine. He told me his father, Fletcher (who preached for over thirty years at Immanuel Congregational Church in Hartford, CT) generally conveyed the message that “he should be better” whereas Katharine offered him complete love and acceptance with companionship for his own adventure in living.

Van was married to Lucille (Hemple) Parker for 62 years. They shared and practiced together a deep faith that welcomed the unknown, the stranger, cherished the Earth, worked for justice and equality, raised three remarkable children. Not judgmental or dogmatic, the churches they served were truly supportive communities. In retirement, Van turned to writing poetry that is observant, witty, wry and always caring. Reversal is a poem included in his fifth and final volume, Growing Still, which combined new work with earlier poems (and whose title is a wonderful play on words).

Reversal

It happens sooner or later
If you live long enough –

A sense of not being in charge
Or, as the French might put it,

Of being passé. It’s not necessarily
A bad thing to be a back number.

In some ways it’s a relief.
No need to keep up with

Somebody’s expectations.
A time to learn about plants

And animals and other people,
To do less judging

And more appreciating.
To begin to connect the dots

And figure out how you
Might fit into the picture.

A chance to re-invent yourself 
And discover there’s more to you

Than you thought there was
And most of it is better than

You dared to believe.

What a gift to celebrate two people who shared with us lives of genuine goodness! I know you have people you honor and remember for the hope and joyfulness they bring…whether they have practiced a particular faith or it just seemed a natural part of their being.

Sharing gratitude for human goodness is essential to remembering who we are and hope to be. In a time when so much deliberate effort is expended to turn us against each other, it’s a touchstone that helps keep us sane—even hopeful. Clear and straight-forward, not weighted with obligation, not strenuous or self-righteous—as though this is just the way we’re meant to be. It leaves us wondering why it’s so hard to figure life out much of the time.

I think of Van and Lucille’s lives as the fertile soil in which democracy flourishes, and it’s the way of living that a real democracy supports and nourishes in return. Of course, individuals, families, and communities all over the world experience and share this kind of ordinary goodness, whatever political system they live in. But what a difference if we live in a system that values and honors this goodness rather than trying to suppress or eliminate it!

There is an intimacy and connectedness to this goodness that lets us join the world around us in its diverse, widening and mysterious presence without the obstructions of guilt, resentment, fear, and judgment.

The gift of picking raspberries, feeling Van and Lucille’s welcome, enjoying the fruit, the place, knowing this might be our last time there.

We are also holding in our hearts Renee Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti…ordinary good people, moved to go out and stand up for others being brutalized on the streets of Minneapolis.

How can their presence be treated as a threat—their lives snatched from them—in an instant of viciousness? The goodness of caring people is under systematic attack.

The snow softens in a brief mid-January thaw. I remember the day 5 years ago when Susan and I—provoked by a similar thaw—built a sculpture on the lawn. We boldly declared it to be a Beluga whale. As we rolled large snow-balls and sculpted our rough artwork with garden trowels, we unexpectedly began to feel we were summoning the spirit of Beluga—inviting it to join us in Vermont. As though the Beluga clan began to feel our welcome, share the humor of our clumsy, affectionate creation. It was a strangely gentle and powerful experience—opening our hearts to the cold north ice and waters, these amazing creatures, deepening our affection for and connection with our vulnerable Earth.

The snow sculpture event also became a celebration for my aunt, Lucille, who died that year. She and her husband, Van (my father’s brother) were the two older friends who modeled for many of us a way of living and dying full of grace, recognition and expansiveness.

The creation of the sculpture, our remembering it, the poem it prompted, the birds at the nearby feeders, and Van’s gentle, wry, loving, comment have become a node of awareness I cherish. In the midst of a world fevered by ego, desperation, cruelty, anger, and profound unhappiness, I want to share it with you.

More about Van and Lucille in my next post.

*** Come join me at the following event if you are near Central Vermont:

Poetry Reading at the Jaquith Public Library
122 School St., Marshfield, VT
Sunday Afternoon, January 25, 2:00-4:00

I am excited to be reading with poet friend Judith Janoo at this wonderful community library. The event is the first of four poetry readings at the Jaquith, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of Vermont. Thanks to Susan Green, Librarian; and Elizabeth McCarthy and David Hartnett of PSOV for their work in putting these readings together. Click here for more information (scroll down to the event, but please take note of the others). I am thrilled that the remarkable group art exhibit will still be on display when we do the reading.

The Jaquith is an example of how a rural community creates opportunity for folks to come together—whatever their political opinions—and participate in the vast ongoing conversations of our culture.

Beluga

(for Lucille)

On the ochre March lawn
a length of blue plastic baling twine 
beside it a black two-inch 
piece of flexible garden hose.

They were the mouth and eye
of the beluga whale we summoned
from that last heavy gift of snow
a month ago.  Blue line 

as mouth   dark plastic eye
brought the snow to life
as though the spirit of a whale
might pay a two-week visit.  It was 

a hurried sculpture   improbably 
short   tail raised unbelievably 
high   and yet our yard assumed 
the welcome of an arctic bay.

I watch the chickadee beside
the redpoll at our feeder—one 
with a map for staying, the other
leaves tomorrow for the tundra.

And my favorite aunt slipped
off with ease and gratitude
as her husband gently said
to some other jurisdiction.

We tend to recognize in each other and the world around us what we think we already know. We may assume this is a form of intelligence. But don’t we need to see what we’ve never noticed—little and big things—because our blindness so cruelly limits us?

I remember my African-American roommate in college telling me one day: You live in a world that expects happy endings. I don’t live in that world. Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to be around you much of the time? That moment began to change my life.

My wife, Susan, tells the story of a colleague crushing a bumble-bee with great righteousness and satisfaction. To him it was the obvious human self-protective thing to do. He was astonished at her reprimand and instruction on how wonderfully essential pollinators are.

This shock of confronting the unexpected and unknown is precious opportunity. It can easily become an occasion for denial and self-protection. But what if stopping, pausing, learning—even when it is painful—became a skill…a habit…a practice? Increasingly, I find myself wondering what community will be like when we are continuously supporting each other in doing this.

In our Middlesex Vermont valley, the raven has always seemed the embodiment of what we do not know about this place. It watches with awareness and intelligence. It feels like a minor god—ancient resident, observer of change, living memory. Our disconcerting sense of being an awkward guest in the neighborhood is a form of this uncomfortable opportunity—an invitation—if we allow ourselves to recognize and accept it.

“Just Stop” also seems like the right response to so much of what is going on in our world. For instance—acres of energy- and water-guzzling “artificial intelligence” (AI) chip farms sprout across our nation and globe. Who decided we need them? Are they designed to solve the urgent problems of war, hunger, homelessness, environmental devastation, and climate change? Meanwhile “ordinary intelligence” (OI) is repeatedly shocked by our failure to pursue sustainable energy policy; a revived relationship to productive, healthy agriculture; communities of caring that nurture physical, emotional and spiritual health.

We are awkward neighbors globally as well as locally, aren’t we? That’s why the little things matter so much—our lawns, gardens, neighbors, friends, families, non-human companions, all that is said and left unsaid. They are full of instructive surprise if we notice. They invite us to be wiser about the big things as well. Because they are the big things in everyday clothes.

We know our minds get overwhelmed by the “big” issues when they are reduced to opinions, weaponized abstractions, and sometimes dread of impending disasters, that leave us feeling furious or helpless…maybe both. Rhetorical outrage and despair are siblings, I think, and despair blinds us to the ordinary, where our learning takes place…if we let it.

The raven speaks to me with a directness that cuts through defensiveness, despair, and self-righteousness—even glib praise and overconfidence. It offers the terrifying suggestion I could really be different…reminds me there is no time like the present to do it.

Happy New Year

(please rotate your phone for best display of the following poem)

Just Stop

A raven-croak salutes this cold November
valley.   Black wingbeats   then slow-glide 
past darkened firs at our perimeter of sight.
Its echo enters twigs of apple trees   sifts through  
dried grass-leaves   stirs bass-notes in our throats. 

Next spring seven families on the road are slow 
to mow their lawns.   Children marvel as wild 
strawberry and fleabane bloom.   Neighbors approve
the work of early bees—thrive of alyssum and its 
hoverflies   wasps they think they’ve never seen.

An enormous black bear browses early grass
three cubs cling a quaking aspen tree.  The lawn 
and garden borders all go wild—milkweed   black-
eyed Susan   golden-rod and asters…asters.   We 
learn slowly what we’ve changed in coming here. 

Perhaps the raven noticed how we paused.   It is
a minor god   and we the awkward guests.   Just stop
it said.   You could belong.   Don’t rush   conquer
or praise.   Everything here is watching.   Settle in
we have a thousand years   a couple days. 

Every day our Earth draws a blanket of night around itself…tugging till the sun creeps in at the bottom of that cover as sunrise. Not simply the darkness of outer space (busy in its own vastness with wisps of light, tugs of gravity, wandering fragments). Our Earthnight is alive—full of this world’s scents and breathing, sounds, colors—bold and muted—clouds, winds, weather, pollution, dust…and yes, our creature voices, thoughts, dreams, terrors, longing, hope. It is a garment on our planet, circling constantly, joining, uniting—sometimes soothing us in its rhythm.

We’re in a time when a man who should be watched and cared for in a safe institution is given appalling agency for cruelty, revenge, and destruction by the dazed permission and fawning participation of this country. If we recover as a people and a planet it will be as we recognize the marvelous complexity of our world, its astonishing interwovenness and intricacy, and its urgent summons for us to put our humility, intelligence, courage, and loving imagination to work.

Earthnight is a poem of discovery, recognition, and praise. It is a pause, with both restlessness and reawakening. It is darkness graced by the fullness of color.

I began the poem fifteen years ago, just noticing how every color seems to darken toward night in its own rich way. Of course, each cycles back into tomorrow’s brightness as well, so this poem is about the motion and dance of color through cycles of days and seasons. It was not until I was working on the old version that I began to realize how unique our own Earth darkness is. It was a startling and strangely comforting recognition.

Every planet has its own homegrown darkness. We are astonishingly fortunate ours is so rich and lovely. It’s also right to acknowledge our garment of darkness during Winter Solstice when our part of the globe wears it so many hours of the day.

Is it comforting or not to know that what we choose to do in the next years and decades could actually have even more effect on our community of life than the solstice prayers and observances of our ancestors?

As I gathered photographs for this post, I realized that the poem just hints at the complexity and richness of how colors darken….

Earthnight

In June  
memories cling
under every leaf
above   between.
Night gathers
emerald green.

Chicory flowers
succumb
to August dusk.
We know
summer nights
as blue indigo.

At four 
November’s bare
branch quits
lavender… fills 
to purple.  Infinity
absorbs the hills.

The blanket
white on winter lawn
calms its million
glinting eyes
lets midnight   
hold the skies.

Colors claim 
everything they
touch   scatter
from sunlight—weave
of themselves
our earthnight. 

For the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessed with leeks.

Leeks!? you say. Yes, leeks, a cultivar of Allium ampeloprasum, the broadleaf wild leek. The national emblem of Wales, popular in Europe, especially Poland and Ukraine. I love growing them, and the first poem in this post is about growing, managing, and harvesting them. I am taken with their simplicity, elegance, and subtle sustaining flavor. We use them in soup, of course, in stir-fries, stuffing, and they were a major part of gravy-making this year—chopped and roasted in the turkey pan’s juices. It’s a personal ritual to share them with friends.

Leeks

The leaves become their 
stockings underground.  
By fall the stems are layers
of thin socks tugged over
each other—no feet at all.

I plant them in a trench
slim threads with catfish 
mouths for roots.   Green
stretching up   white 
knitting itself south.

So little drama   no 
flowers or raucous vines.
I mound shovelfuls
of soil to keep stalks
buried in the ground.

Harvest may need a fork
to coax the long stem up.
I strip outer leaf down
to a black fist of soil—
expose the pearly sheaf. 

Stacked in my basket
a wagon of small
lumbered trees—we will
have thick soup before
December’s iron freeze.

But something else happened this year. I dreamt about leeks, too.

At first the dream seemed simple. I held one of several harvested leeks, then carefully peeled and trimmed it. I sliced that leek lengthwise to reveal inner layers of the leaf-bundle that constitutes the leek’s stem. They were creamy yellow. Next in the dream, I cut anther whole leek across the stem into what I described to myself as coins about a quarter-inch thick. I dropped those coins (with their yellow centers) into sizzling butter.

That was the end of the dream, but leeks weren’t done with me yet.

I thought about the dream itself, remembering the touch, sound, beauty, aroma, and satisfaction of it. I imagined myself having the dream—not during the cycle of night and day, but after I had died. Would it trigger in some after-life, or the unchangingness of eternity, a twinge of longing for leeks, the garden, the kitchen, the act of food-preparation and sharing? Would that longing have the ability to stir me?

I started reflecting on the power of experiences in our lives, so fragile and mighty in the same moment. When I participate in growing, harvesting, and cooking leeks, I realize that activity is something like imagination. It takes on a power of its own. It becomes a kind of vision—especially when it later announces itself in dream or memory. Isn’t that a kind of invention and imagination—the invisible force instigating much of what is good in our lives? Clearly, we have seen its power to shape the world for better.

Isn’t something like the specificity of growing, harvesting, and cooking a meal with leeks in all our lives? Bring your own moments of particular astonishment at something considered simple but actually wondrous, subtle, and unique. Something you love and enjoy without reservation. There are so many paths to amazement! With all the vastness and complexity of its labor, is this a glimpse of what the universe is striving to make possible?

We are taught to think our lives insignificant when compared to the “big and important” forces shaping the world. But what if the particularity and wonder of every day, and our chance to participate in it, is what the universe is longing for…a flicker on an elm, a monarch on a zinnia, a slow smile of recognition on a child’s face.

Imagination

In
the
intransigence 
of eternity
suddenly
a leek…
translucent  
outer skin   
stubbled
rootthread
white shaft
greening
to leaves.
Inside
succulent 
yellow circles.
A knife 
mints coins.
A kiss 
sizzle and
collapse
in browning
butter…
the
aroma-jolt 
of recognition.

Blessing is a poem about gathering family, friends, strangers, for a meal of remembrance, celebration and connection. For me it’s an affectionate mix of Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashanah, Christmas, special family celebrations, even Seder. Whether we want them to or not, these events inform and remind us who we are.

I’m sharing this poem in Thanksgiving season, which I love for its food, gratitude and family connection. I appreciate that Thanksgiving intends to be for all people in our country—of every faith and background. I have to admit, though, at times it feels like a celebration somehow not big enough. A smugness, a sense of personal and national entitlement can creep into it. I want celebrations to touch and remind me of the fullness of humanity and human community. I long for what I am coming to think of as a right connection with the world we’re part of.

Right connection is not the same as what I got taught to consider “morality” or even “goodness” growing up. It’s not an effort to prove to oneself, or to anyone else, our worthiness and virtue. It is freedom to focus on relationship with the people and the world around us, grounded in an acceptance of ourselves. Of course it isn’t a rejection of morality, but it sees more. It is expansive, interested, and welcoming. It is not full of striving and judgment, susceptible to infection by guilt, pretense, and self-righteousness. It notices failure and loss and finds room in the heart.

In the poem it is Susan’s open heart in the presence of loss and grief that welcomes those who cannot be present in body. Remembering, grief—but more than grief. Courage and openness in the face of loss becomes the blessing. Courage to claim life in its frailty and brokenness. Openness stirs us to wonder and quickens kindness.

This isn’t a campaign to scold about Thanksgiving. I did find, though, that The American Revolution documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David P. Schmidt currently on PBS, offers brutal perspectives on why Native Americans, enslaved, and formerly-enslaved people, and those who were Loyalists, might not find the holiday welcoming. Even just acknowledging this reality about our history creates a shift in my sense of what Thanksgiving is really about. Right connection includes new awareness, interpretation, and the painful acknowledgement of past and present injury and cruelty.

This remarkably honest documentary offers a bold invitation. It’s clarity and breadth of vision leave small room for self-congratulation and exceptionalism, even as it highlights the hopefulness of the American experience. It invites us to face the complexity of our lives and history, the injustice and suffering we have borne and caused, and the power of our connection and potential to live guided by wonder, honesty and courage.

In that spirit, I hope we will all share a wonderful and joyful celebration. As judgmentalism and denial are being widely promoted, may we be full of openness and the courage to learn, guided by what it offers all of us.

Blessing originally appeared in my first volume, Safe as Lightning. It’s been lightly revised. The photographs are of family gatherings and some of the beloved we will be welcoming in spirit this year. The photographs in this post are from family albums. We know you all have photographs and memories that are companions for you at this time of celebration.

I want to add special gratitude to my amazing wife and partner, Susan, for both her skill in putting these posts together, and her deep and abiding love of family, friends, and the world we’re part of. Her presence is everywhere and shines through many of the pictures we share and her gentle firm hand in editing, compiling, and shaping these posts.

Blessing to all of you.

Blessing

You compose a table 
from all the tables in the house
drape it with old linen till it snakes 
through living and dining rooms 
like a Chinese dragon.

White metal lawn chairs come up
from basement slumber 
antiques from the bedroom
where a week of clothes lands on the floor. 
		    
You dig to the back of the drawer 
for family silver   then old stainless
untie ribbons hugging them in chamois cloth. 
 
Wine glasses   from pewter to crystal 
alternate around the table 
suggesting symmetry in their history. 

You remember the spoons
that melted in the fire 
no one here remembers 
and the fourth and missing crystal glass.
 
Guests bring the cold air in 
each with their offering of food. 
Laughter and greeting for old friends 
and strangers they embrace
because you love them all.

Voices rise in the living room over wine 
crackers   chopped liver   baba ghanoush. 
There’s the last-minute rush   the comfort of it—
this in   this out   of oven or refrigerator.
  
It’s as you bring your kugel to the table
the absence races through you   the laughter here
invites the laughter that is gone.
How can we be joyful in the company of loss?

Your knees are weak 
you lean into your closest friend
pause   slowly start to breathe.    And we begin
now that the meal is blessed.

One estimate is that 40 % of U.S. residents produce some food by gardening. Sounds positive.

The same source estimates that 0.1% of the food consumed in the U.S. is produced by these gardens. Not as impressive.

There are so many ways to garden—from a few herbs and a potted tomato plant to full-bore obsession.

Our family moved to Vermont in 1952, part of an early back-to-the-land surge. Waves and trickles of outmigration from cities and suburbs keep happening as people try to build lives more self-reliant and connected to the land.

We tried hard. Sometimes we grew a lot—sometimes total failure. My father worked his (and his children’s) butts off. He really wasn’t good at it. When he became a preacher my mother (and we) did what gardening got done. Despite all the struggles and failures, the experience somehow became a gift that changed my life.

Our culture sentimentalizes it, mocks rural life, turns food production into a mechanical, chemical, and exploitative industry.

But, in the garden, never have I asked if I belong. Not once have I been told I don’t. Sometimes my hopes are dashed; sometimes they are wildly exceeded. I am soul-satisfied by this imperfect generosity.

It is a conversation of the whole body. Observing, learning, and imagining. We think we tell the land what to do, then realize the land is asking what we really need, telling what it needs. As we listen and explore, we find what, together, we can do.

It’s not the goal of this Post to convert everyone to gardening. The world is full of opportunities for our companionship.

But if you are a gardener, please share your experience. If you’re not, share other ways this world engages you.

But bring us your compostables, and enjoy the food we bring.

Gardening

for my daughter, Katie

Why do you love this?  she asks again.   This time 
it’s a question almost shared   affectionate   puzzled 
at enjoyment of half-remembered recitations—  
wood ash for legumes   not too much   inoculant 
to help claim nitrogen from air.   Ritual meets
science   myth   mistakes   and dirty hands.

Maybe it’s the sweat   I think   soak and saturate 
of clothes   fit and freedom of labor in our bodies   
the drip that sips into the soil   fierce wrest of witch-
grass cables   pigweed-tug   purslane-pull…rescue 
for hollow onion leaves.   I pause…admire leaf-mulched 
kale   now free of weeds   fully exposed for groundhog.

No beginning…step into the torrent of beginnings
glint and flicker of stellar dust clasped   calmed   by 
rootthread   rot   and readiness   the anointed sleep 
and coma of unscheduled resurrections.   Here   proudly 
plant potatoes   this year in mulch   more sulphur   layer  
musty leafloads from last autumn’s groom of lawns.

Everything we grow is food for someone else…ours
the art of greedy compromise.   Slugs and earwigs claim 
their portion of leaves.   We try to rescue corn from 
raccoons   who stage their rescue the night before we pick.   
Towers of brussels sprouts flourished only last year…
a midge that burrows buds of brassicas suddenly appears.

I think there will be time for meditation.   Instead 
possession.  This year’s cucumber bed sprouts yellow gladioli
from four years ago.   Memories of Bernie’s primary 
in 2016 wait where I weed pole beans.   Missing pliers
rusted open   ask if my hands remember.   Wolf spider wears 
her white egg-sac.   Digitalis blooms…first time in years.

Home of household trimmings   coffee grounds   failures 
from the fridge   compost to soil.   All else that rots
is mulch.   Strawberries reclaim lost winter taste   beans visited 
on neighbors   garlic   plump   prodigious   log-length leeks.   
Raspberries succulent till late October… wasps work red 
sweetness by my fingers…as if there is a place for all of us.

Good food and endless obligations…the settlement ancestors
prayed for.   I visit a neighbor who’s planted a vineyard 
at the foot of our Mount Hunger…we share grape juice that is not
yet wine   from land we visitors have worked centuries less 
than a bulldozed olive grove in Palestine.   The soil   sun   water  
as we walked the stubbled ground   were not unkindly asking   

What is your hunger?   What are you doing here?

Hope is such a strange companion.

Sometimes it is easy, cheerful, joyous even, like of course!

Sometimes it seems unreliable and demonstrably incompetent, like what a completely crackpot notion…yeah, that is never going to happen!

Sometimes it feels so greeting-card, like stop with the patronizing optimistic platitudes!

And then it is a motor in the spirit that refuses to take what seems obvious or inevitable as final.

That’s why it is the energy injustice fears the most: warns us against to protect you from disappointment; tries to bury with sugar and distraction; scorns and disparages with solemn declarations of failure; paints with buckets of lies; or just plain pounds again and again with threat, bludgeon, and dungeon.

And that’s because they know its strange resilience.

November…end of Daylight Savings Time…up North here, the season of diminished light.

The right time to claim it in all its frailty, imperfection and might…because the gift of hope is unqualified persistence.

One Tree

Bare limbs reclaim
the hills
resting till spring
unsleeved.

A single aspen holds
ten thousand leaves…
a golden claim to permanence
no-one quite believes.

The last dome of color left…
the bleak heart rallies…
such boldness   claims 
our wintering valley.

Autumn has proceeded so swiftly this year! So much to do in the garden, with family, in protest and anguish—and all these season changes taking place with little regard for whether I pay attention or not. Here I am almost to November and no new Substack Post for almost a month!

So, I’m going to share three in (relatively) rapid succession.

I’ve been possessed for years by the strangeness, awkwardness and outright destructiveness of much of what we humans carelessly describe as our “relationship to nature.” This strange asserted dichotomy between us and the astonishingly rich and inventive force that brings us life makes no sense to me. Or as my wife, Susan, puts it much more succinctly: “We are part of nature not apart from nature.”

And yet this notion that we are apart has been propagated, sometimes by religious and philosophical teaching; and now it is practiced relentlessly by industry, commerce, and increasingly the digital marketplace. The operating assumption is that the natural order from which we have evolved is something we are entitled—even commanded—to use and make subservient.

Do we really think we’re separate from the history of life on our planet? Did our ability to think, imagine, and love come from “somewhere else?” How can we portray human intelligence, imagination, creativity, wonder, as anything but dimensions and inventions of this “nature” we belong to?

But the notion of separation has crept deep into our culture. Recognizing and reclaiming a healthy human place in this ongoing creation is a practice not a simple decision.

So here is the first poem. It’s about the “back of the house” we call home which butts up to woods that was for a while stripped to a stony pasture and is now growing back as mixed hardwood and occasional pine, hemlock—and even balsam fir.

Somehow—almost magically— it has become host to many plants that have been important in my lifetime. Together in this unusual community they compose a living memory. Some remind me of other places I have lived. Some (Trout Lily and Bottle Gentian) I met and fell in love with when we moved here over thirty years ago.

They seem gently welcoming to the memories and emotions they summon in me. I occasionally pull up beech and birch seedlings that would bring the woods right up to our house and change the mix of shade and light that lets these beloved plants thrive.

This poem is in my recent volume The Poem of the World, but has been revised from that version.

Bottle Gentian

North breath clings behind the house
as it does every spring—a coolness 
in the air I’ve come to trust—
the voice of an old friend who hid
fierce kindness in a solemn crust.

What I fear I’ll lose   or think 
I have already lost   assembles here.
Edging snow’s melt   a riot of frailty—
seven years to yellow bloom—rusty 
plump stamen—mottled olive trout lily. 

Tiny green-leaved carpet   intense 
red fruit— partridgeberry   then
wintergreen from childhood woods
by Sunapee—and here   balsam fir
which was North Danville’s favorite tree.

The phoebe nests another year.
Dwarf goldenrod has claimed its space
and bracken—slender stalks   green fronds
laced overhead that welcomed me
as childhood’s hiding place.

As summer yellows they begin
their bloom—wild bottle gentians  
blue-purple   tight-lipped despite 
their flaunt of color—quietly
summoning late-season bumblebees.