A Solstice Poem

Summer is my favorite season, heat and all. Here’s to the peak of summer: that moment when, as at the apex of a breath or a wave, there’s stillness before a reversal; when summer’s pleasures are brim-full.

”Praise-Song for the Summer Solstice” was published in my collection The Wheel of Light in 2015. In fact, the book’s title is drawn from the first line. The poem follows a nonce syllabic scheme: each pair of lines has twenty or twenty-one syllables, a nod to the summer solstice’s occurring every year on June 20 or 21.

Best paired with a glass of something cool and crisp at your side. Read and enjoy.

Image credit on blog homepage: Swimmer (1985), Patti Mollica

Praise-Song for the Summer Solstice

As the wheel of light reverses, the trick

is to show the creatures in their cycles

and let them speak for themselves, like flowers:

  clip them, set them in a glass half-filled, without

making grand pronouncements, or waxing philosophical,

but just letting them be.

So:  swallows coming out from under a bridge

as if struck against flint, flying into

depths of light blue air. And back to the water’s surface

for a spindle-prick of a drink, 

the drips spreading circles that fade before they meet.

Water, cold as gin, blue-edged, quenching

the swimmer whole, her mouth gaping, ensilvered

by splashes near the moving chin, head, arms,

and feet, and beneath her watery shadow

an oak leaf settling, a lobed, dark print

on the sandy bottom of the pond. Spring-fed flowers:

Jacob’s-ladder, red cross-stitched

against coarse-woven green. Butterfly-weed,

orange as sunset or blown-upon cinders.

Spikes of purple liatris. Daisies. Coneflowers

whose violet petals drape away

from the rusty centers. Butterflies:

swallowtails, in morning coats elaborately

striped; ladies in watermarked tortoiseshell;

tiny hairstreaks—filigreed enamel, blue-

gray and scarlet—and, perched on fiesta-colored zinnias,

the subtler, blade-winged skippers,

tan, tawny, saffron, dipping neon antennae

among crowded stamens for nectar.

Over the creek an ebony jewel-wing:

inky velvet wings, head and needle tail

of glittering sapphire. Nearby, prairie racerunner,

its body pinstriped by yellow, 

pink, and aqua, streaking into shade

to rest on crumbly loam, under a tent of mint- 

and onion-scented leaves, briar stems, and tendrils,

breathing the plants’ moist exhalations.

Beyond this sand bank, two deer breasting the river,

dark water backflowing smoothly

around them, reflecting white clouds above,

where Mississippi kites, suited gray and white,

go wheeling.... And rimming, ringing it all,

bushes, luxuriant, heavy with flowers

vaporous, tough, made of held-back rain.

The creatures’ intake, skin-take, of water distilled 

from air, element from element, during this pause

before a turn:  longest day.