Morning Poem

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Reflections on Spring’s Shoulder

by Laura Parker Roerden

Photography by Ben Roerden, age 9, 5th generation farmer.

Winter’s frozen fingers still
clutch the ground,
unwilling to yield to a muddy grave.

Some years are like that:
everything worn to the bone,
promise blunt and fragmented.

This morning has no choice
but to rise clumsily against a thick
attempt at erasure.

At best, a hole had been rubbed
into now paper
thin winter.

Rusty bits on trees
suggest disuse.
Nuggets of shriveled fruit,

now hardened
like silent stone,
do not speak of potential.

It’s easy to understand on a day like this
that what we are about to be given
is as easily (and too quickly) taken away.

Still, very soon we will forget
and be lulled into knowing
that rain,

like a child’s hand,
is the bird
upon which we fly into riotously blooming fields.

And our hearts, like leaves, will
stretch before us in a shimmering
river of dressed warmth.

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(Photography by Ben Roerden, age 9, 5th generation farmer.)
© Laura Parker Roerden 2016. All rights reserved.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founder and executive director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She is also a part-time, fourth-generation farmer.


 

 

 

Published by Laura Parker Roerden

Laura Parker Roerden shares a love of what nature can teach us. Writer, public speaker and supportor of youth to boldly know and save the wilds. She is the founding director of Ocean Matters and a fourth generation farmer and thinks today’s young people are reason to be hopeful about the many environmental problems facing us. She lives on a family farm in Massachusetts with her husband, three boys, and an assortment of fruit trees and farm animals.

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