Summer Break!
We’re taking two weeks off to soak in the summer weather, but we will be back soon. We didn’t want to leave you with nothing to read, so below you will find a few summer poems, picked by our editorial assistant, Grace Mackey.
“On the Grasshopper and the Cricket” by John Keats
“The Poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.”
“The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
"Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under
umbrellas of fruit
so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no
other season.
Flip-flips and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of
lemonade sprigs
of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty,
my ponytail
all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of
course, red
from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into
my bucket
and still— he must have seen some small bit of
loveliness
in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out
which trees
were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—
puffing out
the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue
with two tiny stones.
(a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth
Did I mention
my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and
twisty
around the tops of his book; his hands thick but
careful,
nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees
without tearing
the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses.
I just know when he stuffed his hands in his
pockets, said
Okay. Couldn’t hurt to try? and shuffled back to
his roadside stand
to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I
had made
a terrible mistake. I just know my summer
would’ve been
full of pies, tartlets, turnovers— so much jubilee.”
“From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee
“From blossom comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”
