Summer Rain Jamie K. Reaser
It seemed as if even you longed to surrender to the Other’s most deeply sculpted longing.
You came like a long absent lover at the end of a parched day,
But then,
gentle at first –
How could you?
Fully present, I thought, this will last the night.
So soon you departed!
Oh Welcome! But then, Such fervor!
We are left feeling unquenched. Do you hear? Lips merely brushing past each other can say nothing of a kiss.
I wondered in that moment if it was our desperately wanting you that had unbridled your thunderous passions.
Jamie K. Reaser has a deep fondness for the wild, intimate, and unnameable. Her writing explores themes related to Nature and human nature in this magical, yet challenging, time of the Great Turning. She is the editor of the Courting the Wild Series, as well as the author of Huntley Meadows: A Naturalist’s Journal in Verse and Note to Self: Poems for Changing the World from the Inside Out. Jamie is a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers. She makes her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Visit her Talking Waters poetry blog at http:// www.talkingwaters-poetry.blogspot.com, or through Talking Waters on Facebook.
Lady Toad Jamie K. Reaser
Lady toad, the color of Virginia red clay, Buddha-squats in my driveway silently inviting the sun spent rain coalescing in ever greater stream flows to rush under her pinking pelvic patch and quench her newly emerged thirst.
© Jamie K. Reaser
I adore and admire her – perfectly suited to expose herself to these passionate elements for long nights of meditative solitude intermingled with moonlit love making amidst equisetum stalks at pond edge. Did my soul long to inhabit her form but incarnate in the consolation prize? 29