—Poems and Photos by Jane Blue, Sacramento, CA
SUNDAY MORNING
A great wind shakes the Rose of Sharon.
Then a red squirrel leaps out
and all is still. The tree no longer
laden with its lush hibiscus flowers.
It's Fall, the russet leaves of dogwood
bob as in a terrible, Biblical wind.
Until a crow darts out horizontally
as though embarrassed.
Maybe it wasn't a crow.
So many things are fuzzy now
like my father at his typewriter
in a photo from the Thirties.
I know more about the life
of the dogwood.
Most of its leaves are gone or faded now.
Small birds ravish the berries––
You are asleep, and I will be soon.
Then we will get up
and go to lunch.
SNAPSHOTS
Tulip magnolias brave the cold mornings
bleed into frost. People take pictures of them
budding, satiny, in layers of magenta and cream.
They are like laundry on the bare branches,
freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing.
It's January in California and spring
pops up everywhere: camellias
dropping petals like ragged petticoats
from the laundry line; flowering quince
flaming from unleaved branches spiky
with thorns. Calla lilies poking up their
shafts, ready to unfurl into flowers.
People also like to snap pictures
of the moon. The moon is so close
they feel an intimacy they don't feel with the sun.
The sun turns its fire to us every day.
The moon hides its face, has phases
like we do, pocked as with some human
disease. With zoom lenses they feel
as close to the moon as to their hung laundry.
GO WITH ME, GOD OF THE DOGWOOD
Wind howled the rain sideways, horizontal
when I was young. My father
was gone. I walked, head bowed
into the wind.
Oh the elements when you are a child!
How you love them.
Go with me, god of the dogwood
and god of the rose.
My mother
pulled aside the homespun curtains
and showed me the Milky Way
like a storm against the sky.
Go with me, god of the dogwood
and god of the rose.
HUMMINGBIRD
A tiny hummingbird flies into the hibiscus flowers
of the Rose of Sharon, into the darting bees.
I can't see her drink, she is so quick, her
trajectory so wild, slave to the air's movement
invisible to my eye, my heavy, land-tethered
form. A gulp must be less than a drop
but for her it's a whole meal. Her fast-beating heart
is the size of a fingernail's crescent moon.
Her energy the energy of God; she's always busy
in her heaven. Hers seems a hectic life to me.
It is simply life. A flash of color draws her,
a bit of sweetness. And then she must be off.
***
Oh the world is strange and varied.
Who you think you are, and who you think
your parents are, who you think your sisters
and brothers are, who you think
the hummingbird is and what she knows--
that is always fiction.
___________________
Today's LittleNip:
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
—Jean Giraudoux
___________________
Our Sunday thanks to Jane Blue for today’s beautiful poems from her new book, Obsession with the Dogwood, from Flowstone Press, 2018, available at www.amazon.com/Obsession-Dogwood-Jane-Blue/dp/1945824174/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537718821&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=obsession+with+the+dogwood+tree+jane+blue/.
—Medusa
Cover of Jane’s new book!
(Celebrate poetry!)
(Celebrate poetry!)
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
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