Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry

After Another Difficult Week 

By Linda Aldrich 

In French, pendant means hanging, like pomegranates,

like persimmons, like ideas you keep afloat for poems

that finally find their way to you. Like friends

waning to slivers of moon, then rounding

like the world again, dropping gifts in your lap.

This morning, a pair of bees in my mailbox –

a gold bee pendant from Crete – where she found it

in an alley shop. Two bees holding a drop of honey

between them, an amber bead kept from falling.

Outside my window, the second foot of snow is coming down.

I watched rhododendrons become mounds of white

sadness, like hasty graves. But now this.

How unexpected is summer’s sudden memory.

How easily it buzzes and brims over the morning.

Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2012 Linda Aldrich. Reprinted from“March & Mad Women,” Cherry Grove Collections, 2012, by permission of Linda Aldrich. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, special consultant to the Maine poet laureate, at [email protected] or 228-8263.

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