REFLECTIONS FROM A PORCH SWING

This poem is a woman on a porch swing.

This poem is hummingbirds at the feeder,

dogs on the deck and horses in the field.

This poem is a blue-sky puffy-cloud 

afternoon in the country.

This poem is a woman on a porch swing,

rocking and swinging as her mind roves back

through the memories of all the shambling years.

This poem is a summer’s day:

hummingbirds buzzing and darting, 

dogs lazily thumping their tails,

and horses munching grass under tall cedar.

This poem has early summertime bees in it,

and flowers, and the sound of the sprinkler

swoosh-swoosh-swooshing across the yard,

to grow lush grass for the horses’ evening meal.

This poem is stillness, slowness, 

reverie, and contentment.

This poem – and this woman – know how to

see the glass half-full; sometimes brimming,

but always, stripped down to the essentials,

quenching thirst.

This poem is a summer-blue sky, 

and puffy white storybook clouds.

This poem remembers the whole story, but also is

its Right-Now story, even when the woman 

forgets to remember that,

and even though she knows 

the pages remaining are slim, 

compared to the bulk 

of the chapters gone before.

It is still the same story.

When she remembers that, 

she raises her eyes up, and up,

tracks a bird in flight, 

scans the horizon – the her-izon –

and finds much satisfaction

in sky, in dogs, in horses, in trees,

in that true blue dream of sky

she fell in love with in her childhood,

that has kept her Looking Up

(-head back, grinning at the azure vault -)

all these years.

A variation of a Boomerang Poem, created by Hannah Gosselin, and a great leaping-off place for poems.