#arapo

Poppies

Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their orange flares; swaying in the wind, their congregations are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin and lacy leaves. There isn’t a place in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness, but now, for a while, the roughage

shines like a miracle as it floats above everything with its yellow hair. Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade from hooking forward— of course loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness,

when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold, I am washed and washed in the river of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do— what can you do about it— deep, blue night?

words and photo by Aura Glaser

as seen on:

“But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.”

Traces by Matthew Shenoda

In the hard shadow of the moon when the recesses of light have gone   and the faint red of the hawk’s shoulder has disappeared from the sky in the growing pulse of the praying mantis when the city has come into its own new light it is here where I often remember:

the weaving of ocean vines the trails of history, cemented by touch the small ridged blossom of the cowry shell the indigo dye made radiant by the seller’s basket.

The way the long grass   emerges at the shore. Something of that meeting.

These are memories both distant and near traces of them lived and felt   laughing in the company of the ones who came holding the silence of the moment, as we stare   with wonder, at the bubbling ruptures of a painter’s canvas, pull, with care, the clinging skin of a stubborn fruit.

I recall these moments   not from the grand gesture of a thing once known,   but from a small place the place where my child’s hand is hidden warmly inside my own.

https://soundcloud.com/poets-org/matthew-shenoda-traces

Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Shenoda. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 13, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

another by Matthew Shenoda to go read: Somewhere Else