I can't sleep…
Like mine, the moon’s eyelid is droopy.
It too is old and has been around.
We pass our time together without saying a word,
like brothers scything weeds long after dark.
His scythe has caught a little light,
but mine has not.
We still have work ahead, as long as we can see.
~ Ted Kooser, “August.” The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book
Photo: r2–d2
Heat lightning: at the horizon,
July in heavy boots paces the hot floor of the darkness.
A bulb in a wobbly lamp jiggles.
Or is that you, my friend,
approaching across the firefly hills,
swinging a sloshing pail of moonlight?
~ Ted Kooser, July. The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book
Photo: Blue Moon by Masahiro Hiroiki taken on July 31, 2015 in Nanbu-Cho, Tottori, Japan.
The most beautiful flowers of courage
are not seen in the showy,
loose petalled bouquets of our leaders,
enormous gardenias perfuming whole banquet rooms.
No, they are blossoms like this:
a child-sized young woman with a homely face,
alone on a seat on the city bus,
eyelashes thick with mascara,
lipstick smudged onto her small, determined mouth.
~ Ted Kooser, July. The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book
Image Source: Ziemowit Maj
There are few perfect things in this world, and one of them is your common everyday pound of butter, cool in its box, printed in blues and greens with pleasant images – a farm, a farmer, a cow at a fence – and divided into quarters wrapped in immaculate paper as neatly tucked and folded as a soldier’s bunk, each section as easy to slide in and out as if riding on soundless rollers, like drawers in a filing cabinet, two two-drawer cabinets placed side by side, the files packed in manila, clean and fresh, with evenly spaced dividers arranged by a tablespoon. To press it to your cheek and then, with a fingernail, to carefully lift the triangular folds at each end, one end at a time, and then, without tearing the paper, to open the final flap and find there butter, yellow, pure, and flawless, too good to be true.
Photo: Rose Water & Orange Blossoms
We see only the moon’s fixed face, as you know. It never turns aside in pain, in anger or disgust. It is thus the good parent, holding the earth at arm’s length, gripping its shoulders with cool white hands, turning and turning around it as if it were saying good-bye, as if it were taking one last long look. But the moon with its homely, familiar face, has been wishing that we fare well every evening for millions of years, fully knowing that we would be there in the morning, ready to try.
Photo: Russell Tomlin (The Oregon Honey Moon) via This is Everything