I wrote IN THERE WITH THOSE GIRLS over twenty-five years ago in honor of my father’s 70th birthday. It was subsequently selected for publication by Marge Piercy, the poetry editor of TIKKUN Magazine at the time. LEAVENING, another poem chosen for publication at the same time, follows.
Writing together, we have learned to greet and hold our own and each other’s most tender and most outrageous expressions and everything in between.
Hot tea in hand, we get cozy on sofas and rocking chairs, behind us walls the color of peach skin.
“Wild and perfect for one moment before they are nothing forever…” Mary Oliver writes of the peonies in her poem, Peonies
“I think to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds, to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.” ~Sharon Olds
Reading the poem led me right back to the small patch of grass where, squatting in complete absorption and wonder, I watched a bee courting a globe of clover. Right then, nothing else existed for the bee—or for me.
