by Laura Parker Roerden I. My mother used to talk about the garden she and I would plant together in her retirement, with imperfect peonies, roses, lily of the valley, and tall stands of irises swaying in the breeze facing the western sky of the upper pasture, where the sunset we watched nightly could mirror […]
by Laura Parker Roerden As a child, we had a hand pump over an artesian well by a white, double-decker chicken barn. It was the only water for hundreds of birds growing on that land. The pump required several hard thrusts of the handle to raise the water like spirit, to the surface. Then each […]
by Laura Parker Roerden I read today that a flock of seagulls was once trapped in the eye of a hurricane. The birds had sought refuge in the false calm of fair skies, but didn’t realize they now flew through a tunnel of destruction, all ways out blocked by certain devastation. Birds that sense plummeting […]
by Laura Parker Roerden Small things sometimes call us home, like the two birds I saw circling the hay field this morning on my way back from farm chores. Their shrill vibrating whistle, a half warning, half invitation stunned me awake from a deep dream—even though I should have been sufficiently awake from an hour […]
by Laura Parker Roerden Every single evening in her short life the garden spider spins a web of concentric circles. Each anchored to five or so holdfasts, simple spokes on a wheel, against which everything hinges. Around and around she goes, adding to her work, bridging the distance from one holdfast to another, length by […]
by Laura Parker Roerden All day long I had lain in the grass and waited for the sun to reach the clearing, though it never did come. The dew from the morning had left my hair damp to the touch; my heart aching for something I had never expected to miss. I knew these woods […]
by Laura Parker Roerden Something tells me you could chart the path of a heart the way a peacock raises flowers like too many moons. I saw our peacock in full bloom today and noticed the eyes in his feathers expanding like the universe; a quick shudder of his plume suggesting no boundaries to his […]
by Laura Parker Roerden I have always thought rocks uncommonly beautiful, none the less when I notice one along the river move: a long neck gracefully emerging from the mottled grey mound and now pointing towards the river. It’s only in the refection in the water that I realize that what I have before me […]
by Laura Parker Roerden The reeds are awakening in a dawn of haloed light. Morning has risen and is lined by low tide at the edge of the marsh, where gulls are already signaling I am late; late to the riotous exposure of mussels and clams and polychaete worms; late to the stars that […]
by Laura Parker Roerden Go to open ocean, I heard, as I had spent too much time struggling on the edges in the surf. There is only one way to climb out of the grave of a riptide; all lifeguards know this. You must swim parallel in deeper water. You must give up the safety […]
