To the tomato thief

One more day, I said yesterday.
Tomorrow I will proudly pick two perfect tomatoes,
the largest my 10×10 garden has produced
during my first year in this community space,
surrounded by people who give advice,
water my vines while I’m away
and remind me to lock the gate.

Today, I walked past wild vines
taking over Connecticut soil and stopped short.
My two perfect tomatoes were gone.
The space they occupied yesterday
stripped clean as if they never existed.
A thief had bent over my chicken wire fence
and plucked my perfect pleasure.

I blamed myself for not picking them earlier.
Those huge red orbs taunted anyone who came near.
Maybe they thought I was away, that the fruit would rot,
Maybe it was a stranger who jumped the fence.
Maybe it was simply someone who had bacon and lettuce,
but no sun-ripened, summer-kissed Big Boys.
I forgive you, I whispered.

Enjoy.

New chapbook of poems

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Weekly photo challenge: prolific

The word “prolific” describes the feelings and images of a recent trip to Thailand and Cambodia — loads of Buddhas, overloaded trucks, trinkets in the Bangkok markets and the incredible expanse of of Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world.

The URL for this challenge is: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/prolific/

I used to lift high in the sky

And every night was an adventure.
I didn’t fly, I simply lifted at will,
looking down without fear
at the world below.

No one looked up
while I was suspended overhead,
and I had no concerns
about the people below.

I didn’t see a string,
but something guided me,
softly lifting and lightly touching down.

Tonight, I will more likely
be naked while no one notices
or running late to take a test
that I haven’t studied for.

No wonder I lie awake for hours.

 

Weekly photo challenge: Rise/set

To illustrate rise, the softest pinks and purples of an early morning sunrise from a quiet cove at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.

To illustrate set, an ominous sunset after an unforgettable tornado and high winds slammed through Fargo, North Dakota, on an otherwise quiet, mid-summer day.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/rise-set/

 

 

Weekly photo challenge: Green!

This gallery contains 11 photos.

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When death enters

We have no words of welcome for you here.

Did you take a wrong turn, forget the address?

What purpose in taking this woman, this mother, this wife?

What twist of fate have you tapped into?

Why slip in to take this life without a whisper?

We’re left to make sense of your choices.

To find purpose in a life without.

To recreate faith and hope.

That’s what humans do

after you leave.

 

 

Getting started

And so we begin again.
Finding our way into a new year,
looking for tracks left behind from the last.

These first days feel unshaped,
vague, ghost-like, without definition.
As if they, too, are undecided where they’re going.

 

Weekly photo challenge: Paths

Mile after mile of gravel roads.

So much of my childhood spent on those rutted paths going somewhere, coming home.

So much stone swallowed by the earth.

Avenue of the Giants, 2016

The silence of centuries
settles in amid these giant redwoods.

Nothing to say to us,
their limbs whisper high overhead.

And, later, when we yell
a friend’s name who has wandered,

our voices feel choked off
by these solitary sentinels of the earth.

Why should they speak to us?
Such weak creatures without roots.