At Hanson’s Farm
I’m sitting with friends on a white metal folding chair
nibbling strawberry shortcake with berries we’ve picked
from the farm’s ragged acres, biscuits we’ve bought from
the farm stand, vanilla ice cream we’ve sweet-talked
from Hanson’s wife who said they sold it only on weekends
but gave it to us anyway—magic we’ve cobbled for the day—
when out the corner of my eye a sparrow is chasing what
looks like a smaller bird down to the ground. What’s landed
isn’t a bird, and what I first take for eyes are like a child’s
chalk drawing—huge black ovals as if painted on top
of the head, and below flows a two-inch long body, wing
covers speckled like rhinestones—oh, how generous
is the world to have concocted such a baroque dazzler:
an Eastern-eyed click beetle. Praise the beetle, praise
the deception of those eyes, their beauty, told slant, eyes
as large as an owl’s, flat black and the O of the inscribed
white eye rings. Praise the shutter of the sun’s lens widening,
spring solstice just around the corner from now in the steady
click click of the seconds. Praise my lingering here, knowing
I’ll be home late for dinner, traffic will be killer,
the ice cream’s melting and I’d better eat it now, better
lean into the swaggering, bountiful, buggy blue yonder,
the crumbly, slightly stale biscuits, berries with the heat
of straw still in them. Praise knowing I wouldn’t want to be
like Eve, unable to savor the sweetness until after, until time
had run two-legged and out the burning gates.
Editor’s Note: This poem reminds us that sometimes it’s okay to slow down when you’re not supposed to, because beauty often unexpectedly happens during those in-between times.
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