July 2024
Linda Blaskey
linblask@aol.com
Bio Note: In my second career, I was a dressage instructor, now retired, though I still have my last horse (our combined ages add up to 98 years!). I grew up in Kansas and the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and now live in the flatlands of southern Delaware where my husband and I foster 12 cats that were abandoned on our farm. I am editor of the online poetry journal, Quartet, which features the work of women fifty and over; am author of four volumes of poetry; and received the 2022 Masters Fellowship Grant in poetry from Delaware Division of the Arts.

Fall Morning, Alone on the Porch of a Cabin
in the Pennsylvania Woods

Birches at the end of the lane all lean toward magnetic north,
the arc of their bend elegant as a strung bow,
leaves golden, each breeze carrying more to the ground.

I, owned by a sky that says it will not clear today,
pull snug your gifted sweater, its essential weight and warmth.
Katydids sing out their desire and their dying.

An Arkansas Farmer Explains

If you engage with the soil long enough,
sing to it songs of drought and redemption;

if you find a place to place your knees,
leave prayer-imbued indentions when you rise,

it will give you back all you need;
it will reveal earthworms to chickens

©2024 Linda Blaskey
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL