poetry

Little Cabbages

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While spectating my daughter’s soccer game, I surreptitiously watch a little boy dig a small hole in the frost-killed grass. He’s met a new friend, I surmise, another younger sibling, and the two of them make homes for a handful of plastic dinosaurs — nests the boys call them.

On their knees, they’re completely entranced. When the game’s over, they wander away, each to their own family.

In our garden, it’s Brussels sprout season now. Beneath the black edges, the tiny vegetables are perfectly green, tender as spring.

My favourite vegetable, without a doubt,
Is the humble, but holy, Brussels sprout.

— Angela Wybrow

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In Praise of Pie

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

When I came home from work, my daughter was cutting up apples on the kitchen table while her cat lay beside her on a chair, gnawing a leaf of chard from the garden. How many pies have we baked and eaten together?

Really, there’s one predominant theme in our family life — I could list reading and work, hiking, friends and so on — but eating ties us together. Haphazard as our lives may seem at times, each of us doing a slew of things, when we’re together, we cook together; we eat together.

My daughter dug into the bag of cookie cutters and stamped out a heart from the scrap dough. She pressed the heart on the center of the pie and took fork tines to the pie’s edges, crimping them prettily.

There are
other things you can do in Vermont. So goes the
rumor: like observe how the clouds thin
deceptively before blizzard, let go of yr
natural hostility & don’t accuse anyone of
running a junkyard; he’s only making
his ends meet.

— Barbara Moraff

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Long Trail, Johnson, Vermont

 

Scarlet and Gold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On my way to pick up my daughter from soccer practice, I leave early and take a walk behind the community gardens, where the wildness of Woodbury Mountain meets the edge of town.

All day, rain has drenched us, and the scent of broken leaf and dogshit and the hummusy, earthy fragrance of wet soil mixes. There’s no one here, in the woods where I’m sheltered somewhat from the downpour, walking among the giant pieces of granite — debris from the town’s former claim-to-fame industry — among the brushy goldenrod, asters, and burdock.

The thing about Vermont foliage — every year — is that I expect the season to be done, finished, dulled to gray, over, and suddenly the red appears. Silently, stunning, often brought out in its finest with a cold rain.

Every year, it’s the same nostalgic sensation — I’m a third-grader again, walking home from school, scuffling through knee-high piles of leaves, happy to be free from the classroom and play outside all afternoon. Every year, the season change is tinged with sadness at the passing of time, and yet, silently, fiercely, beautiful.

In a handful of seasons,
water and cold and dirt

get under the paint and it falls
from our houses like old bark.

— Kerrin McCadden

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Coyote Calling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

October already, again, the fall has bent around again, and before long, snow will fall again. What will we do? The same things, I suppose, we always do. Boil beans and onions and chilis for soup, keep the house warm, lace up the ski boots and slide over the fields.

At our old house, further along in the autumn, we’d walk down to the bus stop in the dark. The girls and I would listen to coyotes howling in the hills. Here, in town, we’ve heard coyotes, but rarely. It’s foxes we see here.

My daughter returns home from school enchanted with learning French, dreaming of distant lands. She has her summer tan yet, her hair sun-bleached.  She’s dreaming of her driver’s license, of flying to Africa, stuffing her backpack and hiking the French Alps…..

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

— Tom Hennen

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Woodchuck

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Geese fly overhead in the dark evening, so near I hear their wings beating. Frost hovers, gathering strength.

Yeah, my daughter says, that’s what geese do. They’re out of here!

The garden’s gone wild at the end of the season, its queen the mightiest and heaviest sunflower head I’ve ever grown. Its stalk might rival a sturdy sapling.

The woodchuck’s gnawing my cabbage heads near the garden gate. In another year, I might have set the trap, but this year…. Gnaw on, chuck. Winter’s coming. The cabbages are profuse.

A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

— T. E. Hulme’s “Autumn”

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Nearly 9th Grade

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

While the girls swim and jump off the bridge, I read a chapter in a history of Vermont — same old, same old.

We’re in the long, slow, cricket-singing days, just before school starts. The garden is jammed full, the leeks a failure, the nasturtiums a mighty army colonizing beyond their territory.

The days are jammed, too, with all the pieces of work, crammed in with When will we paint the barn? Fix the car’s exhaust. Mark when property taxes are due on the calendar. — All things I consider so important but will have forgotten in weeks, perhaps months.

The girls lean over the bridge in the sunlight, talking quietly, glancing at me and wondering if I’m listening. I am. I’m watching and listening, until I dive in and swim away, with only the lapping water against my ears.

On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.
— Issa

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