Driving home from work tonight I heard the word “copse” in the audiobook that’s currently keeping me company in the car, and my mind set off on a path of word association that took me deep into my childhood.

I grew up in the rural Midwest, roaming 300+ acres of pastureland owned by my family and my best friend’s family. “Copse” immediately took me back to the wooded alcove set between two hills in my grandmother’s pasture, near the creek that ran in summer and froze in winter, a place where I played and rested and read, both alone and with my sister and friends, for hours and hours on end.

From there I hopped from memory to memory through my childhood. The result is a poem I’m not ready to share in its entirety, but here’s a single stanza:

…Green is the color of summer in the Midwest,
the apple trees we climbed,
pastures we reclined in,
hills where we rode horses for no reason
other than the feel of the wind in our faces
and the warm, live bodies
breathing beneath our legs….

It feels good to write again after a drought, and also to read and hear others’ poetry.

Current poetry reads that I’m enjoying include Jacob Saenz’s Throwing the Crown and Traci Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins.

Over on Escape into Life, there have been some lovely poetry posts recently, including sets of poems for both Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. A sampler, from the Father’s Day poems, is this beautiful image in “After Dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf,” by Angela Narcisa Torres:

…Sun-sick toddlers
drop their sweaty heads like summer’s
last dahlias….

Sigh.

I’ve also really been enjoying a series of essays that Basel Al-Aswad has been publishing on EIL about his childhood in Baghdad. These are sweet, evocative pieces that breathe life into a city I’ve never seen and a culture I don’t know firsthand. I highly recommend them all. The most recent, part 3, is called “Little Man in the Big House” and provides links to the prior two. Savor them.