A governor it was proclaimed this time, When all who would come seeking in New Hampshire Ancestral memories might come together. And those of the name Stark gathered in Bow, A rock-strewn town where farming has fallen off, And sprout-lands flourish where the axe has gone. Someone had literally run to earth In an old [...]

September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the Little Marvel Stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears. She thinks that her equinoctial tears and the rain that beats on the roof of the house [...]

THE WISHES on this child’s mouth Came like snow on marsh cranberries; The tamarack kept something for her; The wind is ready to help her shoes. The north has loved her; she will be A grandmother feeding geese on frosty Mornings; she will understand Early snow on the cranberries Better and better then. This poem [...]

I always like summer Best you can eat fresh corn From daddy’s garden And okra And greens And cabbage And lots of Barbeque And buttermilk And homemade ice-cream At the church picnic And listen to Gospel music Outside At the church Homecoming And go to the mountains with Your grandmother And go barefooted And be [...]

If the year is meditating a suitable gift, I should like it to be the attitude of my great- great- grandmother, legendary devotee of the arts, who having eight children and little opportunity for painting pictures, sat one day on a high rock beside a river in Switzerland and from a difficult distance viewed her [...]

In the middle of our porridge plates There was a blue butterfly painted And each morning we tried who should reach the butterfly first. Then the Grandmother said: “Do not eat the poor butterfly.” That made us laugh. Always she said it and always it started us laughing. It seemed such a sweet little joke. [...]

Every month or so, Sundays, we walked the line, The limit and the boundary. Past the sweet gum Superb above the cabin, along the wall— Stones gathered from the level field nearby When first we cleared it. (Angry bumblebees Stung the two mules. They kicked. Thirteen, I ran.) And then the field: thread-leaf maple, deciduous [...]

How far is it to peace, the piper sighed, The solitary, sweating as he paused. Asphalt the noon; the ravens, terrified, Fled carrion thunder that percussion caused. The envelope of earth was powder loud; The taut wings shivered, driven at the sun. The piper put his pipe away and bowed. Not here, he said. I [...]

Cherry-ripe: dark sweet burlats, scarlet reverchons firm-fleshed and tart in the mouth bigarreaux, peach-and-white napoléons as the harvest moves north from Provence to the banks of the Yonne (they grow napoléons in Washington State now). Before that, garriguettes, from Périgord, in wooden punnets afterwards, peaches: yellow-fleshed, white, moss-skinned ruby pêches de vigne. The vendors cry [...]

Just as the sun was setting Back of the Western hills Grandfather stood by the window Eating the last of his pills. And Grandmother, by the cupboard, Knitting, heard him say: “I ought to have went to the village To fetch some more pills today.” Then Grandmother snuffled a teardrop And said. “It is jest [...]