Contentment

I looked outside directly into color. Joy
popped in for a visit --- contentment was given to me immediately and graciously and I was able to accept it, to take it in, to swallow it whole. Nagging depression moved off stage as beauty met me at the door and we waltzed appreciatively into color and the scent of English roses. This moment of transformative delight --- how do I savor it, save it, keep it always? Perhaps the answer is to let its vibration dissolve within my cells and I'll be changed forever.

Queen Elizabeth

I'm sitting outside on the deck as the sun rises to the level of the Queen Elizabeth rose that stands
regally in the middle of the rose garden. The sun is shining through the delicate petals making their translucent quality visible in light and shadow as the dark green leaves become white in reflection of a rising Missouri sun. The scene brings me back to the heart of poetry that I thought had been lost over the past few months . . . but all it takes is witnessing a scene of beauty in a moment of focus to bring back and up front the wholeness that poetry brings. "Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being." Jane Hirshfield

Memories of Now

He brings me roses 
from our garden and 
my mind sees my father
bringing Mother roses
from their garden and
she would say,
"These are lovely." 
Like a recording
of voice between  my mother
and me, I say
"These are lovely." 
Of all the moments shared
in the marriage of my parents,
I wanted this giving moment 
of roses to be mine, also. Now,
flowering into time, an
act as sweet as
I saw 50 years ago.

Peeking in and peeking out

I am a chair in the corner by the window kind of person. The inside looks better as I look out the window and I see so much--neighbors and cars, the mail person delivering expected seasonal catalogs, the UPS runner delivering the excitedly expected book from a used book store in Colorado. Today as the thunder storms continue to roll across Missouri's belly I see the elegant David Austin roses looking in at  me as they grow rounder and fatter during the wet, cool days of May 2013. Each day is a new page from a garden catalog--the roses hang over the pansies in the window box which sits above the deep purple iris next to the neon orange scarves of the poppy heads. Today is a silent inside day and I will continue to write in many colors as the storms pass by and the roses peek in.