Poetry Friday: Home is a pond with lilies

Happy Poetry Friday. This week I spent a few days in a place I dream about frequently, a place where I feel completely at home: the northeast corner of Pennsylvania.

I stayed with my dear friend and fellow writer Marileta in her old farmhouse on a hill. We walked and talked, talked and walked, sloshed in mud, drove in the rain, smelled pine trees, looked at stars, and picked baskets of vegetables from her garden. We spent a wonderful writerly afternoon with our mutual friend and comrade-in-words Clara, shopping and talking and reading together (and overdosing on garlic). So much fun.

I'm home now, in my regular home, but it is hard to believe I'm here. For years, while my children were growing up, we spent summers in northeast PA, in a cottage on Bunnell's Pond. Some years we stayed the entire summer; others just a few weeks. My girls learned to swim there, they had library cards, and they took long walks picking berries. Every summer we went to the Wayne County Fair. My picture book Brave Potatoes is even dedicated to the vegetables at the fair!

I wrote most of my picture books in a gazebo overlooking the pond. Here is how our place looked then.

It looks close to that now, but the owners are new.

The girls and I used to go out in paddleboats or rowboats, and in the middle of summer, parts of the pond were covered in lilies. I liked to watch the lilies react to the light and the dark. Sometimes I'd pick one and float it in a bowl of water on our porch, under the porch light. One summer I wrote a poem about the lilies.

Day Lilies, Night Lilies, Night-Light Lilies

                  by Toby Speed

                            I

Day lilies break
open on green lily leaves
like white birds hatching.
They cry, upreaching,
catch me, sky.

In between them
float the bees,
filling up on light lily nectar
from their slowly unfolding wings.

Night lilies huddle
buttoned tight and battened up
in buds that point
ready to launch,
pale rockets locked on pads.

Night-light lilies in a bowl
revolve like petaled moons
in their own small sky
or ballerinas who cannot find
the wings.

                            II

Floating over the lake
like sunny rows of teacups,
day lilies say as they're serving,
drink me and wake.

Night lilies drink their own tea privately
and wait for a kiss from a frog.

Night-light lilies in the porch light
in a bowl
have forgotten which is up and which is down.
No memory of nectar or of bees.
No memory of teatime, or frogs,
or bright awakenings,
and later, when their petals fall,
no memory of wings.

Copyright © Toby Speed 2010. All rights reserved.

Kate has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Book Aunt. Enjoy the weekend, everyone.