Back to work…

and so it is that the slow summer days have come to an end, when we all return to the much faster pace of the school year. my summer was full and rich – swimming pools, lazy days, lots of books, long conversations and short to-do lists.

Returning to school involves a whole different energy level. Though I do get tired, I find that the emotional energy it takes to shift back into our respective worlds is the heaviest.  Kate Daniels sums up my conflicted feelings about the whole transition in her poem below – loving work, quietness, contemplation, yet pulled by those precious little ones toward a much noisier existence.

In My Office at Bennington

 

Mornings, I sit by the open window

in the red barn, reading poems

and quietly thinking.  Coffee idles

in a cracked blue mug, and bees burst

in and out of the unscreened window.  At last, a poem seems possible

again – brain knitting a scarf

of thought, purling it into words.

 

Metaphors emerge after long seclusion –

a green crocus, crusted with dirt, thrusts

through the rotten fabric of an ailing lawn

late in February.  The season is almost

over, or it’s not, in fact, begun. 

 

But then I hear the voices of my children

returning from a meal, hiking up the hill

from camp.  Or the plastic wheels of Janey’s

carriage clattering in gravel.

The cheerful firstborn’s off-key whistle,

airy through the gap in new front teeth

 

and I’m paper torn in half,

 

the poem that didn’t work,

the wrong words, sour sounds,

ruptured rhythms, the confusion

as to what was meant, what I actually

desired besides those three small faces

raised to my open window, calling

my name over and over, Mama?

 

Daniels, K. (2001).  In my office at Bennington.  In M. K. DeShazer (Ed.), The Longman anthology of women’s literature (pp. 872-873). New York: Longman.