In this week’s poem, Grace Sleeman offers a tender reminder for the inner child in any of us: to go slow, revel in the season and luxuriate in our senses. I love the sweetness and wisdom of this poem’s loving advice, and how the abundant lushness of its imagery rouses us to drink in the world.

Grace Sleeman has fallen out of every tree she’s ever climbed. For her, much of the contemporary feminine experience means finding the sensuality in the mundane and finding worms after a thunderstorm. She grew up among the lilacs in Damariscotta and now lives in Portland with two cats and her best friend. Her work has been published by the Stonecoast Review, Asterism and the Red Rock Review.

Freshet
By Grace Sleeman

Babylove, take your time. When will you get this much
time again? To stretch in the sweet curve of your sheets to dream
of the day ahead. Leave your window open

so the lilacs will perfume your bedroom. When you move to the city
you’ll steal them from street corners but for now
they are yours, sweetheart! The tree outside your window

is so full of the blossoms the branches droop with the weight of them.
Shoulder some of the burden; drape your room with
them until there’s no walls left, only purple flowers.

Tear open the grapefruit, smother its slices in honey
and drown your toast in butter. Put too much sugar in your coffee,
skin your knees. Admire the way you bleed spiderwebs

across the pattern of your skin, the way your burned cheeks
crack and peel and sting when you smile too wide.
Sweet girl take summer by the hand and wear dresses

like sheets on the line snapping in the breeze and
hold your breath under the lake in the early morning.
It will all come in its time it will come you can wait.

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. “Freshet,” © 2022 by Grace Sleeman, appears by permission of the author.