Solstice, I wake before sunrise, but I watch the sky glow pink from bed, but not for long. After so much rain in the past weeks, it's a bright fresh day for the year's longest day of sunlight.

Heading across my own meadow, I stop to admire the reddening mulberries suddenly making a show on our tree. I go into the woods, walk to another meadow passing the pink buds of milkweed coming into bloom. Soon enough, the tight green little seed pods will begin to appear.

It's June, the honeysuckle has burst and bloomed, and now the berries, red and round blaze on the bush. 

Once home, I forage for a poem about the mulberry tree and find this one by Craig Arnold, Mulberry. The stanzas that resonate most for me in the poem are below:

. . . Your bark is wrinkled

more deeply than any face

you live so slowly

 

do our voices sound

to you like the fluttering

of  paper moth wings. . . 

All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar 2017 unless otherwise attributed