Seeds in a Dry Pod

The husks of butterfly weed have split and spilled their soft insides.  They cling to their pods in feathery clusters, newly fledged and waiting on the wind.  They drift in the high grass, through asters and bee balm, a seed rain in a dry season. 

And I am like those seeds in a dry pod, waiting for release, or rebirth.

There is an almost centrifugal pull on my spirit as the seasons shift, riding out at the end of my tether with the equinoctial sun.  Everything is in motion - coming and becoming - like the children who pass my house on their way to school, or the butterflies that pause by the cardinal flowers in my backyard.

I may lie out in the hammock beneath the maple tree, but if I look up into the canopy I will see the veins of the worn out leaves and know that the sweet corn days of summer are drawing to a close.  I become impatient, and ready to get on with it.

Autumn in New England is our great consolation for all that ice and mud and our foreshortened Spring.  Those early leaves turning now are the first notes of the dance, the approach of distant thunder out of sight behind the mountains.  I can feel the tension in my bones, sinews taught and expectant. I can feel the thrum of my quickened heartbeat, standing still.

I want to rise up on broad wings and wheel out over the valley with the kettling hawks.  And I want another week of garden basil before the first and final frost, and the warm taste of the sun to linger in the last of my tomatoes.  It is hard to let go, and harder still to resist what comes to us all, in time.

                                        Edgar Lee Masters: 86. Petit, the Poet

SEEDS in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens—
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure—
All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers—
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?

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[Talya Leodari]

"Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness."