A Sunday morning
slant of light – heaven bending
down to kiss the earth.
~ Rebekah Choat
Tag Archives: poetry
To an anonymous one
image by Rebekah Choat
Dear little blue one
(name unknown),
of all the flowers
I have grown,
I love you more than
all the rest;
your simplicity
suits me best.
~ Rebekah Choat
Fan Letter
Dear Miss Rossetti, I remember you
long though it is since you have gone away.
Perhaps when you turned it was late for you;
yet your words counsel me and help me pray.
Though darkness and corruption worry, still,
a vestige of your thoughts also remains.
I mark your footprints on the road uphill
and seek myself the inn toward which you strained.
I’ve felt the weight of sorrow and sea-sand
and seen the brevity of spring and youth;
I’ve thought at times I’d almost seen the wind,
and all but drowned in ocean depths of truth.
I hear the bird sing in the apple tree,
and long for that birthday to come to me.
~ Rebekah Choat
Portrait of my Grandmother
The hands that tied this apron on every morning
that I can remember first picked a hundred pounds
of cotton in a day at age five.
They wrote out sums and spelling words
through eighth grade, then went back
to the more necessary work of picking
peaches, beans, cotton, whatever was in season.
They accepted a simple silver band from
the also-calloused hands of a mechanic
one day right in the middle of the Great Depression,
and they laid down the tow sack and picked up the apron.
Those hands cared for a man and his clothes,
their house and their babies.
They cooked three hot meals every day
and washed up the dishes by hand.
They made the clothes and the quilts,
and ran them through the wringer washer,
and hung them on the line to dry.
Those hands cut and combed and braided hair.
They bound up cuts and burns
and placed cool cloths on fevered foreheads.
They canned peaches and made piecrust
and fried chicken and carried food
to new mothers and grieving widows.
They wrote letters, cut coupons and paper dolls,
and taught smaller hands to crochet.
Those hands planted and watered and weeded.
They could put a dry stick in a pot of dirt and it
would grow. They ironed other women’s husbands’
shirts to pick up a few dollars here and there.
They cleaned the church on Wednesday mornings
and put dimes in the offering plate on Sundays.
Those hands were never idle until they were
folded on her breast in a peaceful pose.
Some people’s lives are written on their faces.
My grandmother’s story was held in her hands.
~ Rebekah Choat
April Fooling
image by Rebekah Choat
Shining morning turn-
ing to storm-
ing without warning:
pounding raining, wild
wind gusting,
thundering raging,
roaring, screaming, then
relenting,
gradual gentling,
sudden sun gleaming,
breeze sweeping
streaming clouds away.
~ Rebekah Choat
A Birthday
My heart is like a singing bird
whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
that paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
and peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes;
in leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
is come, my love is come to me.
~ Christina Rossetti
The Wind
I saw you toss the kites on high
And blow the birds about the sky;
And all around I heard you pass,
Like ladies’ skirts across the grass —
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all —
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
O you that are so strong and cold,
O blower, are you young or old?
Are you a beast of field and tree,
Or just a stronger child than me?
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
Traveling at Home
image by Rebekah Choat
Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.
~ Wendell Berry
Here and Now
A few weeks ago, Baby Girl the Second and I accompanied my husband on a business trip/vacation . Despite long hours in the car and the challenges of helping a nervous child navigate strange beds and unfamiliar restaurants, it was a wonderful trip.
We saw the Independence Day fireworks over the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
In Greenville, South Carolina, BGS mustered the nerve to make it all the way to the top of the climbing structure in the Children’s Museum, I sat on the bank and put my feet in the Reedy River,
we hand-fed bison from the safari bus, and joined a friend to watch the longest minor-league baseball game any of us had ever seen.
We saw elk just yards off the Blue Ridge Parkway as we drove to Tapoco Lodge, deep in the mountains on the North Carolina/Tennessee border. We chased fireflies beside the Cheoah River.
We spent a beautiful day in Cades Cove, and an exciting one at Dollywood. We navigated the stretch of road known as the Tail of the Dragon – 138 crazy twists and hairpin turns in an 11-mile stretch – several times by day and once by thick dark night.
By the seventh day, Baby Girl was missing home, and I too had started thinking about the road back – and all the things to be dealt with on our return to the “real” world. But as I sat on the porch in the still of sunrise the next morning, the cool air and the trees and the goldfinches and the river all singing together brought me back to the moment, to the glorious richness of right here, this very now.
Shadows lie ahead,
yes. But see how that branch is
dancing in the breeze,
easily bearing its own
weight, and the finches’ as well?
~ Rebekah Choat
mountain morning
image by Rebekah Choat
— honeysuckle
heavy morning
drifting slowly
down the mountain —
~ Rebekah Choat
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