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

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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.