Feeding me with words

The clivia is blooming in the yard-corner now, as it has reliably for many years. 

The blooms are starting to look just slightly tattered about the edges now.

Soon they will make their bright berry-like seeds, which usually last through the winter. 

Sometimes I look through my garden photos like these

(we have lived here fifty years and planted everything!)

and think that the photos are another form of nature journal-keeping.

Kooser states at the beginning of this volume that 

he "has always been covetous" of a friend's the nature journals.

Her hair was white, a cloud, and her eyes were the transparent green of leaves with sunlight shining through. It seemed that I was peering into her to find whatever may be hidden, singing there. And as she cut my hair, for that is how she made her living, she told me that in a cardboard box in the back room shand e had two orphaned birds, a tiny Steller's jay and another still too small to properly identiry, She planned to feed and care for them until this were ready to fly, for that is what, she said, she did for love. We talked through the mirror, where I sat in her nest, under the folded wings of a barber's cloth, eyes wide and bright, my shiny old man's beak between them, a woman feeding me with words.

Ted Kooser                 (born 25 April, 1939)

The Wheeling Year; a poet's field book, by Ted Kooser.
University of Nebraska Press, 2014, page 20.


There is almost no sentence in this book, (which the author has selected from his many years of writing things down, and arranged for the months, and seasons, of the year) that is not quite wonderful! It is the sort of book to read, and then to dip into, returning now and again. For tonight, I looked in April, because that month is almost here, and because I am more excited than ever about the springtime!

Notice how effortlessly and simply the metaphor of feeding infant birds is extended into the communication between the two people. Your task: Take a journal entry of your own about nature, and try to extend and enrich it with your vocabulary choices.

 And this was the sun today in Clivia Corner!