Making Potato Salad

Making Potato Salad

The hot potatoes warmed our fingers
as we scraped away the papery skins
exposing white flesh all crumbly and rich
steaming still from the giant water baths.

This is the way they do it
and I’m just here to help.

Chopping onions till tears flow,
dicing red yellow green bell peppers
color like confetti through the white
starch smooth as clouds in a blue bowl.

More chopping, celery ribs into tiny chunks
full of flavor and crunch, right there
with pickle relish for tang and tradition.

Stir in the chopped eggs with sun gold centers
and whiter whites firm as moon slices
slide into mayo and good mustard

into the tub of all things good and tasty,
soon to sit alongside ribs and chicken
all the makings of a birthday feast
assembled by steady loving hands.

Friends and family of every color and description
blend together in the busy yard, a salad of bits
come together, more delicious combined
than just sitting alone untasted.

Holly Show

Holly Show

I never considered holly trees in spring
but sat beneath one
just tonight.
I watched a gliding robin for an hour
at least
while she ferried thrashing
worms and angry bugs across
breeze-rippled foil water
to her gap-mouthed
baby, very round and
not so red-breasted,
perched on the rim of it’s nest—

too-small cup of twigs wedged
in the waxy stellar leaves above me.

I wanted only to rest a moment
on a cool bench after finding
thousands of black tadpoles mass
at the edge of the stone pond,

wriggling apostrophes
in the evening sun
beneath the exclamations
of emerging iris,

but instead I was enchanted
by bird tasks, calls and all sorts
of dusk feedings—

swallows swooping high overhead,
mallards and wood ducks
sliding iridescent reflections in green light

until the birdsongs, traffic noise
and passing leashed
dogs greeted me with awareness—

I regretted I had to leave
and could not spend the night
there in the shimmer of pointed
holly trees
holding baby birds
over the dark water.

Back again from Webster Groves

This is my 4th year writing with May Day. I am still tending a small midwestern corner of herbs and flowers, active with both Loosley Identified womens poetry collective and the local literary community, inlcuding River Styx. I will be in their reading at Duff's on the 19th. More often I write privately and live quietly. My life is simple, cooking and caring for the earth, watching generations emerge.


Zinnia & Marigold

The seeds are not enough
alone. They require so much more.
Even with the season
unfolding like a rainbow fan
hinged on sunshine with rain tassels
the black specks hide, barely
covered with compost, coded
by a flowering ancestor to grow
when water softens resolve
when warmth allows the code
to unfold again. The planting
is always the first wave of magic
waiting the for the slow color
to emerge, tumbling upward,
spilling into the audience,
the crowd of seating tiny lilies
in white granny caps, the nearly
spent tulips already through
with their stage time.
The curtain of sky draws blue.
These seeds are not enough
without all the hands required,
the soft stirring
of the soil around the promises
laid down before a storm.
Drops of rivers and oceans
head this way, a wet show
to fall on the quiet scene,
carried on what may be
what is needed. The show
must go on.