Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: After Another Difficult Week

Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

On a winter day of despondency and nonstop snowfall, today's poet, Linda Aldrich of Portland, receives a package in the mail that changes everything.

After Another Difficult Week by Linda Aldrich

In French, pendant means hanging, like pomegranates,
like persimmons, like ideas you keep afloat for poems
that finally find their way to you. Like friends
waning to slivers of moon, then rounding
like the world again, dropping gifts in your lap.
This morning, a a pair of bees in my mailbox-
a gold bee pendant from Crete-where she found it
in an alley shop. Two bees holding a drop of honey 
between them, an amber bead kept from falling. 
Outside my window, the second foot of snow is coming down. 
I watched rhododendrons become mounds of white 
sadness, like hasty graves. But now this. 
How unexpected is summer's sudden memory. 
How easily it buzzes and brims over the morning.

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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2012 Linda Aldrich. Reprinted from March & Mad Women, Cherry Grove Collections, 2012, by permission of Linda Aldrich. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Special Consultant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. Take Heart: Poems from Maine, an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.