In Your Dreams...

Accepting Mary Lee's nudge http://readingyear.blogspot.com to write a poem each day in April has been a great challenge (of course, she's posting her poetry... I love Franki's poem about the red KitchenAid).  Here's a poem (just to inspire us a bit to write... not just about wildflowers, but about anything that's resting in our head or our heart) by Linda Pastan that my friend and colleague , Randi Allison, sent us this week.  Randi is sending us a poem each day via email and I loved this one... 

     A New Poet

Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don't see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In fact
the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea
on a foggy day - the odor of truth
and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil
or a pen or even a paintbrush,
if only there had been a flower.

Photo by R. Crawford

By the way, today is my wife's birthday... presents are wrapped, Susan's sleeping in (I drove the kids to school), soon we'll start our day.  I love that her birthday falls so close to Easter.  I love that Susan means "Lily".  Each year I'm reminded of two amazing gifts God gave me (neither one deserved, both from the Lily of the Valley)... one is eternal life and one is someone with whom to share my earthly life.  It's a week of blessings


Here's another poem Randi sent us.  I think I might share it with Susan today...


A Birthday Candle
Donald Justice

Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles on a cake,
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash,
Yet there was time to wish.