#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Chamomile

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,

Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,

Rumbling in the wind,

Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . .

~ Excerpt from Storm Ending, BY JEAN TOOMER

Frank is home and we talk in the garden after he gets bagels from our favorite place and I have been watering everything. I wonder if I will get a new poem today, so I am a bit discouraged from the idea that I might not. It’s the normal anxiety. First, I have to get to my desk and actually put some words on the page. The warm-up is the garden part. It’s the chamomile part; where I see the tiny blossoms growing in the midst of the lavender by the steps, first thing this morning. I think about Mr. McGregor’s garden, and the brown bunny who lives in our grass and how Peter Rabbit is full of mischief and goes into the garden his mother has warned him against. He does not seem to understand the risks. But his father was put in a pie by McGregor! Peter is caught and escapes and gets no dinner. But, chamomile tea, his mother soothes him at least with this. Anyway, I finish talking and watering and I do make it to my desk in my quiet office and before I know it, here’s the draft of the poem coming onto the page. In the afternoon, I walk to Farm Pond through the hot hot woods, the crazy hot woods and I’m rewarded with a swim in the pond at my friend’s dock, and the extra delight of my brother meeting me for a swim, my bestest oldest swimming pal, and it’s pleasant, but too hot, even the pond, how did it heat up like this on one day? The cold pockets have warmed. I will need to take a cold shower! After dinner, the clouds, terribly bruised above us in the sky and this house-booming shaking thunder to keep me wide awake.