poetpotter

I sat in my car that day waiting for the rain to lighten just a little before rushing into my Toastmasters meeting. Watching people hurry from the building, their umbrellas barely holding up to the downpour, I noticed what a heavy rainfall does and imagined the rest. Some images stay with us a while. Finally, it rains A cloud bursts its liquid load large drops pat a pat on my car roof   splat and slide        down the windshield slope             where dutiful wipers whisk them away                   to bounce off window ledges                         dance on the hood   a car wash without the suds   rain runs …                    a stream against the curb and parched earth           slurps up long-awaited moisture   Carolyn Wilker Tower Poetry Summer Edition 2006 Vol. 55   No. 1

During April, I pictured farmers out in the fields preparing them for spring planting, and of course remembering working the land on our family farm. Now that it's May, planting will soon begin. When I was old enough to learn, Dad taught me to drive the tractor, starting with the smallest Farmall, and from then I drove the tractor to bring a load of hay or straw to the driveshed and I'd driven it  to scuffle the fields, breaking up the soil into smaller chunks after the ploughing was done. Then one day, Dad asked if I'd like to try ploughing. That was with the bigger tractor, and I did. Dad rode on the tractor with me for a round or two to make sure I knew what to do at the headlands and along the rows. Somewhat of a dreamer, I had to pay close attention to the driving and turning for a plough attached to a tractor is a curious thing and a tractor can tip if turned too tight. I made quite a few rounds until Dad checked on how I was doing, and  I decided that was enoug

Another owner of my mother's original home had built a new house, and the old one was going to be torn down. Before that happened, the owner contacted the family members who had lived there and invited them for one last look.  This is what I wrote after I'd learned of the last visit. It was about that house that I visited as a child, what I remembered, and what I thought might have happened in the mean time One last moonlight A vacant house          dim as moonlight’s glow      in its west windows bare of brocade and lace once a proud house shelter from the heat and cold rain and snow hosting games of hide and seek laughter and song Sunday family dinner its doorpost etched with children’s growth a notch for every measure wooden stairs worn smooth by a hundred pairs of feet tearful good-byes at the front door thistle and wild carrot grow where civilized gardens flourished a leaning picket fence weathered down to its wood it’