BOOK: Earth Prayers: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations from Around the World by Elizabeth Roberts, Elias Amidon
POEM(S): Crickets by Sue Owen
Some summer nights you
can hear them getting all
worked up over this idea
of cheerfulness and song.
Deep in the grasses where
they hide, there is a need
to be heard in the darkness,
even if their voices are
so small they sound
like a door creaking on
its hinge, or the squeak
a drawer makes when
it opens up at last.
It seems as if the damp
air and dew are trying
to hold their song down
out of sheer gravity,
but neither dampness nor
darkness makes them stop.
In fact, the crickets like
to show off their song,
to let it lift up off
the earth the way that
all notes rise to the stars,
and float up through the
thick night, as if their
joy itself were the only light
we needed to follow.
before August goes by Maya Stein
Let me remember the vivid hue of the baseball green and the Little Leaguers
timid but determined at the plate. The thin film of pollen
dusting the pond late afternoon. The knocking of two woodpeckers
on the porch roof. The crunch of moviehouse popcorn. Leaves, fallen
after a thundershower, and the carpet they made of the driveway.
The view from Mt. Ida and Sugarloaf and Holyoke. Rainbow Chicklets.
Slices of tomato flecked with sea salt and ground pepper. The smells of hay
and mint and barbecue. How the light changes, incremental, until the crickets
come out. The loose threads of cutoff shorts. Lemonade stands. An ice cream drip.
And time trickling out, not a threat or cautionary tale but permission slip.
QUOTE: “When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
