Flood

It has been raining

Since yesterday

The streets

And creeks

Are deep

With water,

Guzzling,

Gurgling,

Mud-yellow red,

Dirty,

The thirsty

Earth

Is frowning,

Drowning

In the downpour.

Rock Creek

There is nothing quite as primal

As being barefoot in the park

As the primordial rocks warm on your soles,

The water dripping down your ankles,

The sound of the stream splattering regularly

Down the cliff face.

Silver Wind

 Excerpt of a poem by Carl Sandburg:

 

Do you know how the dream looms?  how if summer

       Misses one of  us  the  two of us miss summer—

So I shall look for you…

In the listening  tops  of  the  hickories,  in  the  wind

       Motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imi-

       tations of the slow sea water on the shingle silver

       in the wind—

                  I shall look for you.

 

“Silver Wind” by Carl Sandburg from Smoke and Steel.  ©Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, Inc., 1920.  This excerpt as seen on a portrait of Sandburg in Hendersonville, NC, with lines arranged here as originally published.  MBH 

Summer

I like summer.  It makes me happy.  It makes me feel alive and optimistic for the future.  I don’t get sad in the summer.  I don’t get lonely.  I am not, usually, depressed by the warm air, the gorgeous breezes, the sun-dappled water, or the grand mountains.  Summer here is an amalgam of childhood’s memories and later-life remembrances.  I am all at once ten and then thirty-something.  My soul lives here; it haunts the side streets and corner benches of small towns along the line.  It grows old at the soda fountain.  It rests by the stream.  I need not grandeur nor renown; I have the summer.