Going a' Maying

Now that National Poetry Month is over, I can relax a little bit from posting new books by NC Poets nearly every single day on My Laureate's Lasso.

Now that my laptop seems to have died, I can't pull up the photos I'd planned to post today--Mayapple, trillium, wild geranium, purple iris with two yellow show-offs in the middle. Sounds like a poem, so here's your assignment for today, which in our mountains will be a rainy one. Write a poem using wildflowers in it, as many wildflowers as you want. Sure, you can sneak in an iris or two, an azalea, and you can even plant a cabbage head, some broccoli, kale, spinach, some good brown wet soil. Just because it's no long National Poetry Month doesn't mean you can't write a poem! Or read one.

Looks like I'll be posting less, being laptop-less, but who knows? I have my husband's big Dell to work on, which I'm doing now. And I have a few poems up my sleeve, too. Here's one by my friend Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin, from her chapbook Patriate.

Cross-Quarter Day
Something stirring, deep. Day
dawns a minute early, spilling
yellow light across the field, sparking
fires in frost-crystals on fallow rows.
Next to a grizzled nanny, two new lives
quiver on cold new legs, blink east:

                  What’s this?

The seed stirs. The woodchuck turns
in her dreams. All these women
to-ing and fro-ing between worlds,
Persephone, Brigid, Demeter,
lifting up candles, calling out
to one another, it’s enough

                  to wake the dead.

Crocus opens slow cobalt eyes.

          Shhhh
says the sap sleeping in the sarvis tree.
Not yet.
Soon.