Days Like Honey

In sultry Missouri I was drenched with orchard orioles fruit colored song that tasted like the cream on the bottom of a bowl full of sliced peaches.  I was only nine when we moved away from there, but I still remember large moths by night and butterflies by day.  Flowers sprang up among the furnace clinkers on the end of the driveway and I breathed the intoxicating smell of tough green walnut skins that stained my hands brown as brown as grasshoppers tobacco juice they spit when I caught them.
My father used them for bait when he fished in Hinkson Creek.  The days were as sweet as honey then.  I played on Ross St. with Sally and Nancy.  We made necklaces and bracelets from the clover we picked.  We wanted to play war with the boys, but they said we had to be nurses so we went back to our more feminine pursuits: playing house in the back yard, with long poles we laid out  for a floor plan, creating plays where the bad one was always named Madge.  We investigated dragonflies and lightning bugs.  I had a turtle named Winchester and a puppy named Penny.  I miss those day.

Butterfly Lovely at Ox Bow

Butterfly Lovely At Ox Bow

Mossy ash and maple

Spruce and sassafras

Willow and pine

Open forest where butterflies play.

Butterfly lovely today

The air exhales butterflies

And blue damsel flies

A jay complains.

Crickets sing

Grasshoppers open their wings

Yellow tiger swallow tails flutter

Then bend slender stems as they

Land on  pink flowers

Their spiral tongues suck nectar

From the sun

They fan their wings in dappled shade

Taste flowers with bushy black feet.

Now a green caterpillar marches up my sleeve

On dozens of feet.

                                         ---Barbara Spring