Meditatio

Ezra Pound

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs,

I am compelled to admit

That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man,

I confess, my friend, 

I am puzzled.

Summer Night riverside

Sara Teasdale

1884 –1933

In the wild soft summer darkness How many and many a night we two together Sat in the park and watched the Hudson Wearing her lights like golden spangles Glinting on black satin. The rail along the curving pathway Was low in a happy place to let us cross, And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom Sheltered us, While your kisses and the flowers, Falling, falling, Tangled in my hair.... The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky. And now, far off In the fragrant darkness The tree is tremulous again with bloom For June comes back. To-night what girl Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair This year’s blossoms, clinging to its coils?

Strawberrying

May Swenson

1913 –1989

My hands are murder-red. Many a plump head

drops on the heap in the basket. Or, ripe

to bursting, they might be hearts, matching

the blackbird’s wing-fleck. Gripped to a reed

he shrieks his ko-ka-ree in the next field.

He’s left his peck in some juicy cheeks, when

at first blush and mostly white, they showed

streaks of sweetness to the marauder.

We’re picking near the shore, the morning

sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves

our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel

the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there,

their squishy wounds . . . . Flesh was perfect

yesterday . . . . June was for gorging . . . .

sweet hearts young and firm before decay.

“Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,”

a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot

in the furrows. “Don’t step on any. Don’t

change rows. Don’t eat too many.” Mesmerized

by the largesse, the children squat and pull

and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half

for the baskets, half for avid mouths.

Soon, whole faces are stained.

A crop this thick begs for plunder. Ripeness

wants to be ravished, as udders of cows when hard,

the blue-veined bags distended, ache to be stripped.

Hunkered in mud between the rows, sun burning

the backs of our necks, we grope for, and rip loose

soft nippled heads. If they bleed—too soft—

let them stay. Let them rot in the heat.

When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy

leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes

once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty,

still attached to their dead stems—

families smothered as at Pompeii—I rise

and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped

head. Red-handed, I leave the field.

Summer Stars

Carl Sandburg

1878 –1967

Bend low again, night of summer stars.

So near you are, sky of summer stars, So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars, Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl, So near you are, summer stars, So near, strumming, strumming,                 

So lazy and hum-strumming.

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

1935 –2019

Who made the world? 

Who made the swan, and the black bear? 

Who made the grasshopper? 

This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The House on the Lake

Philip Metres 1970 

How a house is a self & else, a seeping intoof light deciding the day. A house so closeit breathes as the lake breathes. 

How a lakeis a shelf, an eye, a species of seeing,

burbling of tongues completing the shore.

How a loon is a probing, a genus of dreams,

encyclopedia of summer. Unsummable houseby the lake, generous hinge opening us. 

I loved,in folds of sleep, to hear the back door’s yawn& click. 

You gliding down toward shore& dawn, beyond all frames, reconciling yourself tobracing Long Lake. Into its ever-opening, you—

Summer Morn in New Hampshire

Claude McKay1889 –1948

All yesterday it poured, and all night long    

I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat

Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,    

Upon the grass like running children’s feet.

And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,    

Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,

Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,    

And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.

But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!    The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,

The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,    

The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.

And all things were transfigured in the day,    

But me whom radiant beauty could not move;

For you, more wonderful, were far away,    

And I was blind with hunger for your love.