Farm and field

Sometimes

By KATHLEEN G. GRIMALDI

Sometimes there’s an invisibility

to khaki-colored farmlands left fallow

throughout the growing season.

Wide expanses of no growing thing.

Scattered pieces of abandoned machinery.

A lone tire swinging back, forth

from the limb of a lone tree.

Sometimes it takes a certain kind of faith

to see past the land’s emptiness,

to see in the waiting

the farm land’s awakening,

to hold oneself open,

like the land,

for a new growing season.

White Field

By MARCIA NEHEMIAH

Was it the early, heavy snow,

or a bear harvesting her final meal

before the wintering in

that forced the rotting poles to fall?

Some unseen urge joined

with cold, shorter days to offer

these last morsels of corn and cucumber

to the earth’s nibbling wild things.

Sunflowers, tomatoes, chard retract

from their blackened stems

with one final exhalation to the sun.

They know the wisdom of letting go.

They know how to wait in silence

in a white field.

This week’s Celebrations poets:

Kathleen G. Grimaldi lives and writes in Lords Valley, PA. In summers, she divides her time between the mountains of Connecticut, where she grew up, and the mountains along the Delaware in Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in two anthologies and she has been a participating poet in the Robert Frost Festival of Poetry held annually at his farm in New Hampshire.

Marcia Nehemiah, of Lackawaxen, PA, received the 2007 Betty June Silconas Poetry Center Judge’s Award and honorable mention in the 2008 Mulberry Poets and Writers Association Poetry Contest. Two of her poems were cited for Honorable Mention in Perigee’s 2006 Poetry contest. Her book of poems, “Reclamation,” is available at Signature Gifts in Narrowsburg, NY; Main Street Books in Honesdale, PA; and Mill Run Booksellers in Milford, PA. She is a member of the Upper Delaware Writers Collective and writes a column on sustainable living for The River Reporter.