Keeping pace with the season...

Image: Turkey Feathers

With the summer more and more in the distance, the busy life of the academic year and begun-again parish activities wind us up just as nature is slowing down, fading, even dying...

This fine poem might have beauty and power to calm the harried heart, the hurried step...


And, what is more generous than a window?



The Patience of Ordinary Things
by Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider
from Another River: New and Selected Poems.


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