A Favorite Poem

This time of year, I always dig out a poem that reminds me of the harvest bounty fall brings. I find fall to be my most favorite season of representation…while winter represents dormancy and quiet, and spring represents new life, and summer represents activity and play...fall represents that time we can appreciate what we have, while thinking about how we can enhance our lives and continue to grow.

The Seven Of Pentacles By Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup

she is looking at her work growing away there

actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans

as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,

if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,

if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,

if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,

then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,

a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us

interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

for every gardener knows that after the digging, after

the planting,after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Questions for you to ponder, write about in a journal, or draw/collage around this poem are:

• What feelings does this poem evoke for you? 
• What does your harvest look like?
• Where might you get stuck in the tangling and interweaving? Where might you let go?
• What underground connections do you have in your life? Where can these enhance your life?
• What does "living as if you liked yourself" look like to you?