Sherry Chandler

Today and every day

do something green.

It’s the eve of Earth Day and I don’t know about you but here in Bourbon County it’s a beautiful sunny blue-sky day with temperatures in the mid-sixties. A few hardy flowers that survived the big freeze are making a comeback. And Gin, I think some of the dogwood blooms survived. The beautiful white bracts are all brown and withered but a number of the actual blooms seem to have made it through. There is bee activity. Though no honey bees.

Congratulations to Gin Petty, by the way, for being picked as one of eight earth-friendly artists to be featured by the Kentucky Arts Council on the Kentucky Earth Day page. But I can’t find the right page. Can you help me?

My activity is low-key. I’m hanging out laundry. Because I can. I don’t live in a suburb or housing development with ordinances against anything as sloppy and alive as laundry flapping on the line. And because I like to. No part of housekeeping is more cheering as the smell of sun-dried laundry.

In lieu of anything really significant to say, I’ll give you a poem:

Behind The Blackberry Thicket

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock –
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

What seems motionless is growth and what
seems still is motion. Even my house
moves westward half an inch a year.

Originally published at the New Voices International Project.

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