….
Viewpoint
1.
Breeze riffles the still water, pushes
white waterlilies tight against each other
like boats rafting together for a holiday.
Turtle hatchlings lift their heads above
the surface, like thin bubbles breaking.
2.
By the red backdoor, a crate holds empty
bottles and a scribbled note requesting butter
with the day’s delivered milk. There was
so much we expected. We did not know
we had so much that we could one day lose.
3.
July birches lean out as if to see their own
green whispers reflected in a mirror
or the glow of their October gold and yellow
shouts. In January snow, silent trunks reach,
white and black, for something in the sky.
4.
The attic ceiling slopes almost to the floor, too
low, even at its center peak, for an adult to stand
at the top of the stairs. It guards the toy room
against inquisitive parents –a child-sized
folding table, tumbled dolls, a miniature train.
5.
I am three, on a shady hill above a pond.
It is a new place. My father holds my hand.
Trees around us rustle in the soft wind
and a dog barks at a house down the road.
I can see my whole life in front of me.
…..
This poem first appeared in Gleam, the Journal of the Cadralore, and can be found in the chapbook What Hummingbirds Do by Louise Cary Barden (Finishing Line Press): available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/what-hummingbirds-do-by-louise-cary-barden/ .
…..
WHAT HUMMMINGBIRDS DO celebrates the natural world while sharing the small, significant moments of joy, love, and loss that make up a life. In these poems we climb a white pine with a nine-year-old girl and shoot spring rapids in a canoe with a young couple. We see the white birches of the narrator’s childhood home and the flaming wings of monarch butterflies in migration; we hear the wild calls of loons as they echo across a wilderness lake. And throughout this collection, we consider universal questions and choices we must make in marriage, environment, politics, and relationships in our search for fulfillment.
Louise Cary Barden, a 2023 New Women’s Voices semi-finalist, won the Lois Cranston Prize (Calyx Journal), Oregon Poetry Association award, the Harperprints chapbook competition, and others. Her poems recently appeared in such journals as Timberline, humana obscura, Willawaw and Cathexis Northwest. Her writing is imbued with imagery of the natural world as narrated by a self-avowed tree-hugger whose career indecisiveness has taken her from teaching college English to advertising and editorial copywriting and marketing management. Nature stayed at the center of Barden’s life from her childhood on Boston’s South Shore and education at Hendrix College, U. Arkansas (B.A. English), and U. Maine (M.A. English) through residences from Arizona and Wyoming to Maine and Tennessee. Barden and her husband settled in North Carolina for 40 years before retiring to Oregon, where she is still trying to learn to love the rain.
The Paddock Review 