A Solstice Poem
Summer is my favorite season, heat and all. Here’s to the peak of summer: that moment when, as at the apex of a breath or a wave, there’s stillness before a reversal; when summer’s pleasures are brim-full.
”Praise-Song for the Summer Solstice” was published in my collection The Wheel of Light in 2015. In fact, the book’s title is drawn from the first line. The poem follows a nonce syllabic scheme: each pair of lines has twenty or twenty-one syllables, a nod to the summer solstice’s occurring every year on June 20 or 21.
Best paired with a glass of something cool and crisp at your side. Read and enjoy.
Image credit on blog homepage: Swimmer (1985), Patti Mollica
Praise-Song for the Summer Solstice
As the wheel of light reverses, the trick
is to show the creatures in their cycles
and let them speak for themselves, like flowers:
clip them, set them in a glass half-filled, without
making grand pronouncements, or waxing philosophical,
but just letting them be.
So: swallows coming out from under a bridge
as if struck against flint, flying into
depths of light blue air. And back to the water’s surface
for a spindle-prick of a drink,
the drips spreading circles that fade before they meet.
Water, cold as gin, blue-edged, quenching
the swimmer whole, her mouth gaping, ensilvered
by splashes near the moving chin, head, arms,
and feet, and beneath her watery shadow
an oak leaf settling, a lobed, dark print
on the sandy bottom of the pond. Spring-fed flowers:
Jacob’s-ladder, red cross-stitched
against coarse-woven green. Butterfly-weed,
orange as sunset or blown-upon cinders.
Spikes of purple liatris. Daisies. Coneflowers
whose violet petals drape away
from the rusty centers. Butterflies:
swallowtails, in morning coats elaborately
striped; ladies in watermarked tortoiseshell;
tiny hairstreaks—filigreed enamel, blue-
gray and scarlet—and, perched on fiesta-colored zinnias,
the subtler, blade-winged skippers,
tan, tawny, saffron, dipping neon antennae
among crowded stamens for nectar.
Over the creek an ebony jewel-wing:
inky velvet wings, head and needle tail
of glittering sapphire. Nearby, prairie racerunner,
its body pinstriped by yellow,
pink, and aqua, streaking into shade
to rest on crumbly loam, under a tent of mint-
and onion-scented leaves, briar stems, and tendrils,
breathing the plants’ moist exhalations.
Beyond this sand bank, two deer breasting the river,
dark water backflowing smoothly
around them, reflecting white clouds above,
where Mississippi kites, suited gray and white,
go wheeling.... And rimming, ringing it all,
bushes, luxuriant, heavy with flowers
vaporous, tough, made of held-back rain.
The creatures’ intake, skin-take, of water distilled
from air, element from element, during this pause
before a turn: longest day.