Poetry Friday - Re-visiting A Favorite

            Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading hosts this first Poetry Friday in August. She's sharing a "blitz" poem you must read aloud! It feels rather like a poetic rap, meant to be heard! Thanks, Mary Lee! 
           I know many are beginning their prep for the school year. Summer lingers but cicadas are singing. . . 

        
      I love being outside, am a city dweller so mostly have to appreciate the green space around me, the many parks nearby. When I truly am in the wild, I yearn to stay. This wish goes unfulfilled, the staying, but I'm re-visiting Robert Newton Peck's Bee Tree and Other Stuff, thought I'd share. I started gathering Peck's books a long time ago, was sad when I learned he had passed at the end of May.

 

"Peck ends his introduction with these words: Looking back, I reckon I took a hearty harvest from the earth, as a farmer. As a poet, I share with you this bounty."

      As I grew up spending much of my summers at one set of grandparents on their whole working farm, some of the poems and prose theme touch me again. The book is divided into sections like "Hard Work", "School", "Winter", and "Critters". He writes of the whetstone, the musical sound it makes when sharpening the scythe. He speaks of finding and stealing, yes, stealing, hoards that animals have made, like a stash of acorns from a squirrel and honey from the bees in the long title poem, "Bee Tree". I can't find any of these poems on the internet so I can share part, then give a link. Here are a few lines I loved. I hope you can find the book at your libraries or at a used bookstore, read and savor it as I have.

       Just right for us this new month, Peck opens the section titled "Hay" with words from his father: "There's a mite of sweetness in hay," Papa always said, "like you stored away a wisp of August." 

          In this part, he shares a poem titled "Nest" when upon cutting the hay, a bird flies up to make him go away from her home.

               one verse:

                           "Nesting at my feet, a bird flies up.

                             She scolds me that my work took me so near

                             Her nest, and flies about my ducking head,

                             To beat her irate wings upon my ear."

               the final one:

                             "With a pole I mark her nesting place,

                               Remembering to give it widen berth;

                               So that, with mare and mower, I will spare

                               The little miracle upon my earth."

          It is a memoir, it is nostalgic, and I enjoy hearing from Peck, especially when it is written that so many of his books are based on his life, too. Here is one final verse when he comes across an old barn and writes of what it knew:

                               "I walk across a tired field

                                 To greet an old gray barn.

                                 Empty and alone it stands

                                 To spin a yester yarn."

and the end:           "The rafters now have swallows

                                   Come to build a nest.

                                   The workaday is over.

                                   Rest, old gray barn, rest."

Enjoy your weeks these final ones of summer. Wishing you lots of poetry in them!