October Windows

The dogwood holds

one hundred tinted windows

to the westering light

It's summer-humming rooms

swept empty

of their seethe of green 

are quiet as a church,

and sun enters alone

to set aglow its floors

with rosy tones

as for a holy day.

The eye may enter here

the round returning room

of nature's rest

of nature's secret joy,

of nature's's treasured waiting

for the grand day 

of festivity.

- AFB 10-15-24

Mid-July, West Virginia

In winter, we did dream
of this extravagant heat,
this golden gale of light
that whips each sun-bared limb,
and makes our wool-wrapped, boot-toed tramps
through frosty grass
a distant planetary dream.

There's the indulgent bee,
rolled deep in velvet pollen,
half drunk on sun thick nectar,
oblivious of memories,
buzzing above the silent furnace roar
of pavement baking patiently,
some yards away.

The mockingbird, alone,
careless of blazing noon,
runs, tail high, through the bleaching grass,
after a hapless bug,
then flaps white-flashing wings
to the unshaded top
of some well-favored tree, to sing.

He sings a memory
of the north-flown cardinal,
who habited our winter
with his spark of cheer -
"'What cheer! What cheer!' is here!"
The cardinal is gone.
The red slow-fading sun
has come to linger long.
Its warmth embraces stones,
and deep, damp roots of trees,
and radiates into the humming, dusky night.

- AFB, 7-16-2024 

 

The Country

Grandma used to send our family Country magazine back in the 90s when Reiman publication magazines were glossy and ad-free. Remember those?

I remember my law-abiding child self reading the cover by-line: "For those who live in or long for the country" and thinking this was a requirement for subscribers. "Mommy, we don't live in the country, but I guess we long for it, don't we?" If so, we could read the magazine with a clear conscience. 

We lived in a small brick house in a neighborhoodish part of town, where Main Street was in walking distance. Grandpa and Grandma lived in the country for real - the kind with pastures and cows. I lived for our annual visit to that gloryland of barn and garden. Not less charming was the laundry-hanging room near the attic stairs of the farmhouse. Old newspaper covered the wood floors under the clothespin dotted lines crossing the ceiling, and at the back was a tiny closet stacked feet high with more of those Reiman publication magazines. Grandma let me go to town in there with scissors, collecting pictures and recipes while I lost track of time. 

When I was ten, and our family moved to Guyana, South America, some of those pictures went with me in scrapbooks and folders. As we lived in humid tropical towns and villages, surrounded by spiked fences, memories of a place where grass grew on hills and mowers trimmed its green plushness right to the edge of roads with no barred gates or sewage ditches stayed with me like a dream. 

Life has been hard in the past few years, with illnesses and weariness. But sights like these irises by the shed remind me of those Country magazine pictures, and how God's love is shown to us in many ways. 

When I was a teenager, and we were living in a village by the Berbice River, I found one of those old photos, children laughing in flowers and green grass next to a country lane. I almost wept over it. Then I remembered words from Hebrews, "If they had been thinking of that country from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. As it is, they desire a better country, that is a heavenly one."

I'm back in the country. That's God's grace. But oh, all I want now is that better country. That will be glory.