18 hours Ago
This week’s poem, by Mary Tracy, is a paean to grass, to selfhood, and to Now. I love this poem’s leaps between invitation, pondering, and memory, and its tender final image of a child that so many of us might have been. Tracy notes that this poem began as a “Golden Shovel” poem, which borrows words from another author’s poem and places them at the ends of lines.
She ended up adding a first stanza, but in stanzas two and three, you can see the words of the Carl Sandburg lines quotes in the epigraph. Mary Tracy often starts a poem from an observation or experience of nature and then sees where it leads her. Her work has been published in Balancing Act 2, Reflections, and Poems from Here.
She lives in Portland. Grass What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
– Carl Sandburg Let it grow long, like hair, a luxury of lawn and silk. Let it lighten in the stark sun, become blond above the green, bend under the rain and wind, go to seed and bow. Do we ever know what or how or why? Do we place ourselves in the silence that is wherever we are at this moment, that is the only where- ness we can be? Can we refrain from our refrain: are we safe, are we strong, do we belong now? When I was young, I thought little of who I am.
I felt my bare feet trampling the smooth coolness of my father’s green grass and maybe that was enough to let me be me. That was my work. – Mary Tracy ———————————— Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland.
DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Grass,” copyright 2024 by Mary Tracy, appears by permission of the author. We believe it’s important to offer commenting on certain stories as a benefit to our readers.
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