Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Mary Lee HERE. She has turned one of Lindas “clunkers” into delightful verse about green beans. Thank you, Mary Lee, for hosting!
Today I sat on my porch with a glass of iced coffee, water dripping from the glass, thinking about summer and the 92 degree heat, listening to the sounds of insects, imagining the heat rippling upward from my suburban street.
The heavy air bore down and the loud chirp of the crickets or cicadas in the trees did too, in peaked crescendoes.
I documented the day in haiku:
HEAT rippling off asphalt practically invisible— searching for water WATER In all things alive. Clear, cool, modest miracle quietly cycles. SUMMER SOUNDS Sweltering back porch. Leaves wave as cricket sounds flow like ocean waters.
I wanted to celebrate the living things around me and the interdependence in nature that supports us.
Everything everyone does, day to day, involves water. Water is part of all that is alive and beautiful in the world. I am grateful for heat, too, appreciating as the temps rise how it is moderated so it doesn’t hurt us, balanced by water in lakes, rivers and oceans.
Below is Skaneateles Lake in the Fingerlakes, where I can practically see the water cycling and cooling the air. I recently read how, in the 1800’s, as America grew westward, acres of swamps and wetlands, considered useless and even dangerous, were destroyed to create farmland. White settlers moving out west didn’t appreciate the role wetlands play as thermostat. We know more now about the need for wetlands.
Skaneateles Lake in the Fingerlakes of New York State
On my road trip to California earlier this year, I passed through South Dakota, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and saw many hot places with few trees, endless rocks, and little water, like the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, or parts of the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
The Badlands
The Petrified Forest National Park
So I’m celebrating water and I know I’m not the only one feeling the urgency to protect our environment.
Thank you Mary Lee for hosting!