Today I feel like running this poem that has appeared in various places beginning in the UU World Magazine and most recently on the on-line project "A Year of Being Here" (http://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2015/10/linda-buckmaster-flowering.html). I've been thinking about this place -- Waldo County, Maine -- that I've called home for the past four decades as well as the people in my life I have lost over the years including my brother Ric this past April (you might have seen him in some of the essays I've posted on this blog).
"Flowering" was conceived sitting behind a rock to escape the wind on Inishmore in the Aran Islands. If you know anything about the Aran Islands, you know that the winter winds blow the topsoil away every year and so islanders, from the medieval monks who lived out there to current residents, have to rebuild the soil from seaweed and what we'd now call compost to plant their potatoes.
Flowering
"Flowering" was conceived sitting behind a rock to escape the wind on Inishmore in the Aran Islands. If you know anything about the Aran Islands, you know that the winter winds blow the topsoil away every year and so islanders, from the medieval monks who lived out there to current residents, have to rebuild the soil from seaweed and what we'd now call compost to plant their potatoes.
Flowering
At the Ruins of the Seven Churches,
Inishmore
Pick a crevice
a homey gap
between stones
and make it
your own.
Grow a life
here
from wind and
rain, the
memories
of ancients
embedded
in limestone.
The bees will
use you
for their
sweet honey.
The rock will
soften
under your
touch. You
will draw
moisture from
fog and hold
it. Your
presence will
build soil.
This is all
we have in
this
life, all we
own:
a flowering
an opening
a gap between
stones for
tiny
tender roots.
Copyright 2007, Linda S. Buckmaster
