It’s a stormy, drizzly, gray Fourth of July in Austin, a phrase you could take literally or metaphorically. It’s too wet for most festivities locally, and I could easily have let the holiday pass by altogether if I hadn’t received an email from the good folks at the Strong Sense of Place podcast. They included this poem by Barbara Crooker, and I immediately typed it up and stuck it in the poetry box. True, the weather will keep people from seeing it until days after the holiday is past, but still: sparklers, mothers, the names we write again and again. I hope you enjoy it.
“Here, we keep tracing in tiny
pyrotechnics the letters we were given at birth,
branding them on the air. ”
While I was away from the blog, I posted a series of spring-related poems. This year spring was captured in an excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Let Rain Be Rain” by Danusha Lameris, and “Ceremony for the Seeds” by Linda Hogan.