nature spirit

Some of my favorite moments of poetic creation have been when I take seemingly unrelated images and ideas and pack them together into the same poem to create a new thing. It’s like the satisfaction of making a really good collage or a quilt–when you put together things that don’t seem to have any relationship to each other, and suddenly when they come together, a kind of alchemy occurs. A shiny new layer of meaning is created.

Yesterday was a collage of a day, a quilt of a day, a poem of a day for me. In the morning, as I was cleaning out the market room and setting up bins of vegetables and bustling about in the morning work of the day, I kept getting that feeling you get when you know someone is looking over your shoulder, or watching you from a distance. I actually turned around–several times–to see who was there, but everyone was still up in the fields harvesting. At one point when I turned around, I thought I saw someone slip behind the sycamore tree, but when I looked in the reflection of the shop window behind the tree, no one was there.

A few hours later, when the harvest rush was over, my children came running to tell me that they had discovered a “milkweed moth” on the swing set. (Last year, we had seen a Luna Moth resting on a milkweed plant–it made quite an impression on the boys.) They showed me, and there she was, fresh as the beginning of the world, wings still unfurling. We watched her over the course of the next couple of hours as her wings filled out to their full glory and she opened them up. She was still there, in the rain, when we went to bed last night, but this morning she is gone.

Luna