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| Carol Waller Youmans 1940-2019 |
George Squires
WILDFLOWER HUNT
Where wildflowers are the woods are waiting. We can see the ridge from our backyard, my sister and I, and the dark greens and the pale, the blues of its distant canopy are waving to us when suddenly our father says, Let’s go for a drive up the mountain. My sister rides shotgun next to our father so I’ve got the backseat all to myself, my six year-old body stretched out full on the warm leather, eyes squinting in the sun, the car weaving its way up the mountain. Telephone wires rise and sink, waltzing outside the open window like they can hear some sweet and secret music. I think I hear it too, and I’m humming to myself when we pull off the main road onto a side spur and the car goes bumping over a narrow cut between tall trees. My father stops and we get out, our usual whooping voices toned down to whispers in this green and quiet place. We follow a well-used deer path into the woods where my sister spots our first wildflower: Trillium, my father says, a word that sounds regal to me, and I squat to look more closely at its three scarlet petals like the hood and high collar of the Red Queen in a picture book I saw once. The next one is a funny word and we giggle when we hear it: Pipsissewa, named by the Indians, my father says. And as soon as he points it out, we see it everywhere, dark green jaggedy leaves peeking out of the black dirt and pine needles, a few with their clusters of pinkish white blossoms. Pipsissewa, pipsisssewa, I chant under my breath, and then I spy something else. Tiny blue bells hanging from their tender stems, and I wonder: who might ring them? Some people call these witches thimbles, my father says but only my pinky finger is small enough to slip inside. Up ahead my sister finds water gushing from the rock face on the high side of our trail. My father pulls some magic rings from his pocket, metal circles that telescope out from one another and rise up to form a cup. He dips it in the rushing water and we each take a long drink, so cold and so sweet. My father keeps us walking long into the afternoon, and my legs are growing tired. He’s looking for something, I can tell, but he doesn’t say what. Finally he motions us over to a small, hidden patch of flowers standing tall on sturdy stems: Lady Slippers, he says, but they look less like Cinderella’s famous shoes and more like fancy ladies dancing, each with outstretched arms and puffy pink dresses. These are a real prize, he tells us, not easy to find. We kneel beside them, our gentle hands reverent with care. Lightly we touch them, as if caressing a slender foot. We know without being told that these, like the others, are not to be picked. We wind our way back up the mountain passing through a clearing of yellow dandelions and tall weeds frosted white with Queen Anne’s lace. Our hands are empty but wildflowers are imprinted now on the bright undersides of our eyelids, and we practice their names on our tongues until my sister breaks into a Girl Scout song, our hushed voices long since lost to the day. We sing all the way back to the car: I love to go a’wandering along the mountain track. After awhile, our father joins in.
Lucette Bernard, April 14, 2021
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Communion by Kathryn Kyker
When we are young, if we are lucky,
The old ones lead us to Her in places dappled
Streams sing over rocks worn smooth, through patches of light in
Tunnels of green, seeking: lilies, watercress, minari, slow pulse of place
Endless moments saturated with treasure unearned and essential
A secret sacred story
Reverence our only offering
If the moment resonates in you still, the initiation took.
She turns languidly
as we toggle back and
forth in factory-made
lives of forgetfulness, one
action begets another in
service to a product—sure
to mean everything-- that
means nothing.
Our memory veiled til we taste her on the air: the sticky sweet
Of hyacinth, the tangy salt of the shore, the petrichor of rain on dirt.
She unfolds
Onto fingers smelling of marigolds, in sun bleached
Pebbles at a far-from-home beach, in the wind tormented
Tree hugging a hillside, and
When we are old, if we are lucky,
we lead the young ones and She
Is waiting
A secret sacred story shared
Reverence our only offering
If it resonates in you still, the initiation took.
by kk, with thanks to Sylvia, Lucette, Tina, and Lee Isaac Chung
Easter Eggs
On Easter, I issue orders to ingredients as Mom
comes with an escort of red tulips. No longer
tight at attention, they flaunt their insides boldly,
at ease. A movie plays, an ancient burial
unearthed, as I crack egg after egg, til one reveals
a dark curl of limbs, intending to be more
than a quiche at Easter, but there are no miracles
here. I tuck him deep in the mulch bucket under
a garlic skin blanket. Tomorrow he will feed
the groundhog patrolling the field. You
arrive, reporting for duty on the home front, shields
up. I tell no one that a dead baby chicken tried
to join our vegetarian feast, but I can barely eat for
seeing that delicate swirl of life in a home that
failed to defend him from his own fragility
Kathryn Kyker, 4/2021
Winter Light
Bold walls
Bold roofs and windows
Unencumbered spaces.
Just the dried stalks
by the roadside;
The milkweed
with its sudden white
generosity spilling
and being carried
mysteriously above
the fields.
The red barn
with the white trim
is itself a mute
fact in the field.
Shadows of bare limbed trees
etched on the faces of houses.
The dying of the leaves
gives us a glimpse
of the bright plastic slide
in our neighbor’s backyard.
How along with nature’s
shorn self
we become slowly
one people;
our flattening privacy
undressed.
Coming over the rise
a sudden pond
never seen before;
a green roofed
viewing cottage
on its bank.
Without their leaves
the trees are dancers.
Only in the most densely
packed forest
cedar boughs
hug close to the ground.
The spaces dark.
At higher elevation
grass stalks
are the foreground
for blue mountains
and regattas
of clouds.
Maples are muscular
and wild.
The oldest maples
tremendous
and prophetic.
Jed Feffer November 6, 2019
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